you can’t blame everything on drugs, right?

 

Unlikely Stories Mark V 

everyone says you're free, but everyone lies

 

RECENT WORK AT

J.A. BOOKS

MAGAZINE

J.A.Books Magazine Summer 2024 Issue 

we starve and we drown and we butcher each other

 

NEW WORK AT

GYPSOPHILA

Gypsophila: Volume 3 Issue 3

PAGAN DAYS

 

YOUR DEATH, SEEN THROUGH YOUR LOVER'S EYES

 

LIVING WITH ALL THE SHIT THAT YOU MADE

John Sweet: Three Works

— landscape w/ solitude / modigliani’s gun.                                       Holy&intoxicated Publications, 2019, broadside.

— approximate wilderness.  Flutter Press, 2016, 41 pp.

— a nation of assholes w/ guns.  Scars Publications,                 2015,  32 pp.

    In the author’s note on the back cover of his gritty and powerful collection approximate wilderness, John Sweet speaks of the book’s poems as “not defeatist but cathartic.” I think this description fits all three of the works under consideration in this review. Sweet’s poems are edgy, violent, and chaotic. To oversimplify, I would say they are in the Bukowski mode: with the form being short, jagged lines, with little capitalization or punctuation; and with the content being sex, booze, depravity, and squalor, with a sprinkling of high-art and pop-culture references. However, Sweet’s world is his own: many of the poems feature war (whether literal or metaphorical) as a backdrop, and frequently they are set in a chilly, post-industrial North. Other characteristic motifs include missing persons (often female and pregnant), guns, adultery, lonely children, and fragmented Christian imagery. In some respects, this mayhem is Sweet’s critique of America. He makes this clear in the final lines of his poem “rise” (from approximate wilderness):

in the end

it’s some 19 year old asshole w/ a knife

cutting open the animal’s belly just

to watch it bleed its life out

just to feel the crystal meth rush

of mindless annihilation

just to be so goddamn american

Nevertheless, the poems are cathartic, and—I like to believe—art beats death every time. Take the final lines of Sweet’s “litany of concentric circles” (from approximate wilderness):

static poured out of the hole in his heart and

he said the poem was the important thing

said the gun was just a metaphor but

he wouldn’t stop bleeding

laughed when i showed him what i’d written

and told me i’d better try again

–Tom Zimmerman

15 August 2020

GOODBYE GOODBYE GOODBYE

 

a fist squeezed too tight to ever hold anything but pain