JOE HALL

I find the directness of your chapbook disarming. So many books of poetry with an autobiographical I position this I in different places observing and making meaning from these observations. But why do I trust them at all to tell me the news about whatever they feel like observing? They are a program called photoshop maybe I don’t know.

So anyway, your chapbook looks through the lens of a defective heart that we know is always there, beating before it is a metaphor. We have bodies that will die and that is a problem that I care about. I care about books that search out form poem by poem.

…they clicked, sputtered, spit,
and tore apart: one beat.
I dreamt I put the new heart in.

That is John Donne baby. As in, look, I’ve got to make this damn thing work.

I do not know about butterflies and duster planes here but that is maybe because I hate flying. I mean really flying. But what the hell am I saying. Lyon’s poems know transformation, true transformation, is impossible and you can make that fine:

“My admission to this world / is wholly patronizing, my laugh / aromatic, my thoughts small music: /
on and off.”

Thank you for the chapbook.