Shake

My friend Elliot passed this book along to me at an Arielle Greenberg reading two weeks ago, and I'm grateful. The poems are self assured, certain. Beckman staples statements and series of images, all odd and amazing in their own right, into construction-paper garland. There's a wonderful beat underwriting his measured line. He uses this measure to link his surreal generalization in a way that informs the subtle and infrequent facts of life which bleed in from the margins.

Beckman uses linebreak as punctuation so fluidly that you're unware you're missing out on commas and periods until several poems have passed you by. His repetition draws emphasis to phrase and layers beat, forming the lines into a music, a kick-ass electroacoustic show more composistion bouncing around the stereoscopic speaker system in your head. This, married to the form changes from section to section, mold wit, beat and image into a wave, a current of peaks and valleys giving the line space to breath one moment, then crushing it into distilled constriction the next.

The book is made of three disinct, powerful movements. Shake draws life from that construction-paper garland of statement and image. "Let The People Die" stalls the form to draw the most from the repetition, meter, and taste of the language. "New Haven" frees the line from constriction, and flips the sentence on it's head. As parts they form a beautiful and exquisite corpse, given a heartbeat of strict meter, and fed the mad lightnings of surrealism, imagism, and cubism, they become an undead poetry monster. This book kinda rocks. show less