Mellow Actions (Fence Modern Poets)

Brandon Downing, whose Lake Antiquity beguilingly combined painstaking full-color collage with painstaking found poetry and painstaking visual bravado, returns with this collection of new poems, his fourth. You'll be laughing about flotsam, you'll be crying about jetsam. There is nothing but supernaturally canny vernacular to hold on to in these poems, but there is excessive cultural material to dream about.

Wait for me, Raymond Carver!
You piece of shoot!

The girls are too solo, not herd things,
Dirty butt, jelly-jar weed-heads,

Tiny chiggers leaving huge welts,
That is the world waits in the woods.

Me, I can't buy enough Giclee prints
To cover the guile accreting on my walls!

What was that all about btw,
Those donut bushes and Sprite

Ladders running up over the defensive
Walls of our new youth clinic? WTF?

Brandon Downing is an artist and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area, now living in New York City. His collections include The Shirt Weapon, Dark Brandon, and Lake Antiquity.