Arseni Khamzin Khamzin itibaren Motanga, Bihar, India itibaren Motanga, Bihar, India

I won't apologize for liking Jim Harrison. Anyone who doesn't like how much I like him can go for a stroll in an industrial metal compactor. This poetry, which addresses in mostly Northern Michigan colloquial dialect a minor Russian Symbolist and Slavophile poet who killed himself, is as skilled a piece of thinking as anything I've encountered. What I like about poetry that prose doesn't do, or doesn't always, is that it can (not to say should) mirror thought more closely without all the formal scaffolding, without footnotes. Harrison's poetry sometimes reads a bit stilted (I'm still not a huge fan of After Ikkyu), but Letters boils the hyperliterate gripes of a horny rural poet down to a sequence of memorable prose poems, complete with all the unexpected dilatations that make it impossible to get through an actual thought without - well, fuck it. You get rueful poems here about toothaches, taxes and wanting to bring "all the dead back to life." If I were the phone book publisher of a small municipality, I would hire Jim Harrison to work it into something funny and sad. The guy is priceless. Plus it's his birthday today.