Pope John Paul is in Jordan
President Bill in Dakar
I’m here at SFO
Wishing on an airport bar
Within my possession is a signed copy of Klipschutz’ This Drawn & Quartered Moon. Every couple of weeks, I flip through and dog-ear another page. There are versions of humankind and its anxious observer–versions I am drawn to more than others, depending on the day. There were the best ones, I thought. Then I read it again and found the better ones. Then it happened again.
Klipschutz has scrambled “form” and dropped an economical-but-loaded 109 pages into the reader’s lap. His style breaks what literary critique warranted but throws us in ways we never asked for. It feels like a fuck-you to my expectations. And my bookshelf looks empty without its modest white spine wedged between C.K. Williams and Bukowski.
“These days I bite my lover,” Klipschutz writes, a line stuck under my tongue for days. Or, “To make fires for Mommy and God / He swung the axe blade.”
Anvil Press delivers This Drawn & Quartered Moon in a neat package, paperback but resilient to being stuffed inside a busy backpack or balanced with paperwork and this morning’s coffee. San Francisco harbors a thick, brewing mind–Klipschutz is your next lunch hour or afternoon in the park or break from that noisy television you should have thrown out years ago.
Some pieces I dog-eared:
wild wild ways
the alpha beta male
the attorney arrives at his office on april 16th
slab of consciousness
two turns for the gipper (no sweat and horndog agonistes)
the tv weatherman rats himself out
the red wheelbarrow of fortune
housepaint is thicker than water
“I was a worried child…”
JARED JOHN SMITH 