Alamo Theory
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Bell's work is a concoction of the surreal and the hyper-real, the hilarious and the devastating."—The New Yorker
"One of the most tonally versatile young poets working today."—Boston Review
"A contemporary knockout, Bell's poems run the gamut of good: they're seriously funny, bizarre, wry, ambitious, acrobatic, gorgeous. Sometimes they have zombies."—Flavorwire
Joshua Bell's unnerving and darkly funny second collection of poems inhabits various personae—including a prominent series starring the garrulous and aging rock star Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe—through which he examines paranoid, misogynist, and murderous elements within contemporary American culture. Throughout are prose "movie poems" that feature zombies, a summer camp slasher, exorcism, and courtroom drama.
From "The Creature":
Like many humans, I enjoy lifting small, living things. Your wife qualifies, but doesn't like to be lifted. I guess it's probably because, as is true with many humans, your wife doesn't want to be eaten, and often we are lifted, by the bigger thing, right before it drops us on a rock and eats us. I understand, I say to your wife, lowering her body to the kitchen floor, her legs bending slowly as she takes back the weight I've returned to her, like an astronaut moving back into the gravity of the capsule…
Josh Bell earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. He was a member of the creative writing faculty at Columbia University and is currently Briggs Copeland Lecturer at Harvard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bell (No Planets Strike) tackles difficult matters of contemporary politics and society in his second collection, scattering throughout the book a series of poems that appropriate the persona of former M tley Cr e front man Vince Neil. Readers should prepare to chew on every word; Bell has a tendency towards sprawling lines, dense prose poems, and unanswerable questions. He also addresses his material obliquely. "All night long I think I've been wearing a certain hat," Bell writes in "Your Prime Minister Speaks." He continues, "But by now it should be obvious to you, as it is not obvious to me, that I am actually wearing a different hat altogether," asking, in effect, whether those in power know what they are doing and whether it matters. "And who are you/ out there saying," he asks, "that the language/ is still your friend?" For all the collection's sensory overload, the less showy shorter poems pack the most power: "Even then,/ in that silence that seemed almost/ a silence, sadly we were not/ alone." The shifts between the surreal and the earnest can be jarring, even if they fit their 21st century social context. Perhaps that's the point. And one way or another, whether it's Bell's brief flashes of insight or his long-winded verbosity, readers will be left breathless.
