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Selections from Love/Anti Love
Selections from The Lyralogs & Rocking Jail Buzz - by Jefferson Hansen
For information on both books: Homemade Press, Jefferson Hansen, 4055 Yosemite Avenue S., St. Louis Park, MN 55416. Jahnsen@blakeschool.org

The poet Jefferson Hanson's imagination organizes about specific philosophical/emotional instances that he manifests into words that create a realm between the real world and the mind's abstraction of it. He finds his way, and if a reader is willing to read, really read, slow and deep and ponder and allow his poetry to work its way magic than this rare gift of Hansen's poetry will pervade and become also your present. These are two short books of recent selections by a poet's poet and the poet's daughter does the cover. Sample lines: Your idea of me/ gathers more of me/ than I ever could.

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Poems - by Kenneth P. Gurney.
2002. Peshekee River Poetry Pamphlet. PO Box 698, Eastpointe, MI. 48021. $2.00.

Simple enough to begin a small collection of poems by calling the small collection of poems, POEMS. So then what occurs is this small collection gets under the skin like some wild virus or burrowing bug and the poetry like alcohol intoxicates, and this poetic intoxication will not leave and you are left with Gurney's poetry, endless and forever, all day it keeps coming back in mind until after screeching it begins to bleed.

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Night Physics - by Kent Taylor.
2002. 75 copies only. Write for prices and details:
A. Horvath. Kirpan Press, P.O. Box 2943, Vancouver, WA. 98668.

I wonder sometimes why I continue to read poetry. After reading Night Physics, I knew why. The lingering trance like state touches emotional constellations and the aroma of intangible realities. Kent Taylor's book is full of mirrors and memories and many poems about his departed, as in deceased, wife. In his poem Pantomime At My Wife's Grave he writes: I place a poem/ beside your name. This single simple gesture opens a flood of images: a poem as a rose, as a heart, an arrow of Cupid. I do not wish to say, because of this sadness, that his ability as a poet is proved by the fashion and intensity that his poems about his lost mate convey; however, this is true. I am always amazed how the careful placement of a word next to another word invokes such awesome and unnerving feeling. I am in the state of poetry via Night Physics. Kent Taylor's poems did this to me, now, this evening as I sit facing my own mirrors and memories.

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32 Image Poems - by Norman J. Olson.
Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd.Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.

Olson's most spectacular imagination just bubbles out of his mind and all about the floor. The scenario of these poems in this collection occur within mind of Olson as he sits often sipping soda in food courts or out in the hall at work all across the world of industrial America Disneyland. Amazing his sarcasm and deadly accurate twisted/quasi surreal disruptions of the goings on of the feeble and stupid human race. Dear reader, whereever you go - try, TRY to act real because sitting only a few feet away is Norman J. Olson. Pen in hand. Ah, now, yes, I think of it. He is to poetry what R. Crumb is to drawing.

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12 Image Poems - by Norman J. Olson.
Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd. Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.

Entering a Norman J. Olson book is much like entering a bar filled with exotic dancers, male and female, and pimps and gun and knife wielding bandit bikers and various drunken outlaws. In a sense, one wonders what one will encounter. And up at the bar it is anybody's guess because Norman J. Olson's imagination runs the court with the ball. His poems take an incident and overwhelm that incident into a constellations of words until the thing itself, for instance, in this book of 12 poems, stepping inside a mega-mall becomes 15 and more lines of image upon image oven both in and out of his position in world and mind until the imagination concurs and succinctly represents that instant and, of course, it is most terrifying and simultaneously exciting and lovely.

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Image Poems From the Hallway of the Endicott Building - by Norman J. Olson.
Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd. Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635. Write for information and prices.

These are a handful of poems that will ring with absolute truth the reality of anyone who has worked for any length of time in any form of bureaucracy. Olson's observations are so clear in their exaggerated metaphoric complex that the world which spawned them is altered and the new, fierce and bizarre reality of Olson's poems replaces the dumb lust driven, pathetic, dismal and dull and meaningless existence of middle class office life. He writes with starkly sticking imagistic word strings. In his old office building are vampires and lobsters, wobbly chairs, stained ties and diet soda and time is measured by the shake of the asses of women who walk by. But why should I try to explain using Norman's language, here is a sample:

Silent angels masturbate
and grin
and
an old man in
a worn brown jacket sits at a
salmon colored Formica table and sips diet soda
through a red-striped star. Imaginary
ants crawl toward the ceiling. His eyeballs roll
acorss the floor,
looking for
dancing lobsters.

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