"Popular song" by Harry Man (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from "Ink, Sweat & Tears", Magma, etc. Over 30 people get "Special thanks" at the end, and there are 4 pages of notes.

I can see how Luke Kennard might like the book. I guess with this type of zany poetry one should expect poems to contain a mix of good and unsuccessful lines, and for there to be a mix of good and unsuccessful poems. My guess is that many other readers will notice the patchiness but disagree with me about which items are the successes and failures. There's a large margin of error.

Many of the poems are between 1 and 2 pages long, so there was room to weed out iffy lines.

Titles include "Naked as a Pork Loin Steak in a Poppy Field, I Consider a Horse from the Future". In contrast there's also "Broadleaf" which is a straightforward 1st-person PoV about being a tree - "I realise now, just how green I was ... I'm all about giving back to the community"

There's an SF theme - e.g. "After the magnesium rain, Phobos/ appears as if thrown over the lip// of Echus Chasma, like evidence of life/ being called down for tea and, from way up there,/ a chucked raisin - the reply".

"The Moon Is a CD of Bowie's Greatest Hits" is 4 pages of sentences (mostly one-liners) starting with "The moon is". Some work, some don't - it's up to the reader to do the editing. Here are 2 examples -

• "The moon is a face anticipating a kiss"
• "The moon is explaining to our neighbours how their son's tricycle ended up in the pond and why it now smells so strongly of Malibu and burnt plastic and we're sorry"

"If Xanadu Did Future Calm" begins with "As future plans reverse the harm/ neutrinos go superheavy/ where our universe shakes hands/ with one immeasurable by man/ becoming a Big Bang singularity", which has notes, but they don't help me. The poem does a lot of tech-name-dropping.

p.46, p.50, p.54 - No. p.58 is an N+20. No.

Other reviews

• Hannah Stone
• Tim Murphy (Both ‘Alphabets of the Human Heart in Languages of the World’ and ‘A Short Glossary to Russian Code Words Found in Ukraine’ are somewhat technical list poems that include translations in the footnotes. Each seems to be something of an academic exercise and this makes them feel out of place. The same goes for ‘#1984’, which lists more or less title-related hashtags ... ‘Then’ is a particularly strong closing piece ... Overall, while it sometimes feels uneven and is unlikely to be popular with everyone, this is an inventive and challenging debut.)