This one's a 2001 review from the always immense Lucid Moon.
Thank you, Ralph Hasselmann Jr.
Free Kittens For Dead Slaves, poetry chapbook by John Sweet. 1998, 28 pages, $3 check made out to Sweet Lady Moon Press, PO Box 1076, Georgetown, KY 40324. Aah, a John Sweet poem grabs you by the lapels and slaps you upside the head and shakes you around before dropping you on your ass. Sweet must be the life of the party, writing poems with titles like The Land Of Murdered Cheerleaders, Holy Men Burn, Stillborn Poem, Cancer, and King Of Skulls. Why is John's world so black? Aliens reads: "So we drive down to Roswell in the hottest part of the year two days non-stop with the velvet underground on the tape deck no aliens when we get there no spaceships just Indians selling jewelry by the side of the road and we're told that Kennedy's been assassinated that Marilyn's dead we fill up shopping carts with the bones of lost sailors carve swastikas across our backs we walk into the desert and wait for visions that never come we rape nuns and burn witches and drink the blood of sacrificial virgins we finally understand that nothing's too sacred to destroy." "The futility of poetry is a beautiful thing", Sweet concludes in The King Of Skulls. Maybe that's a key to Sweet's dark world. When destruction and terror and violence are all around us, poetry seems futile yet beautiful. Intense stuff, worth a look.
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