{ bee + spool }

Today, poetry review #3 for National Poetry Month. Reviews 1 and 2 are here and here.

Dan Magers‘ spooky teen/frat/sorority horror sonnets are collected in the clever Exploitation Poems (Immaculate Disciples Press 2007), a 32-page square-shaped chapbook that I recently found at Pegasus Books in downtown Berkeley. Framed under muted olive covers (with silkscreen art) and Japanese stab binding, this handmade chap includes response illustrations to Magers’ poems by Matt Bollinger, who also designed the book. Both art and poetry underscore the lesson to be imparted from all teen horror flicks: If you get it on with a co-ed or fall asleep in the woods, you’re dead.

The chapbook begins with “Frat House Massacre”. Lest you wonder about its outcome, “Frat House Massacre II” is in store for you on page 14. Given the contemporary theme, one may figure a grouping of poems in some free verse manner, but the poems are structurally marvelous for a writer who is reading both for pleasure and to learn how to write (like me). (You can read the sonnets in a duh-DUM-duh-DUM-duh-DUM fashion, which is a very pleasant activity on the short BART commutes this chap and I’ve been riding.) Magers honors the 14-line form and rhythm throughout.

Poetry, and this set in particular, suits the idea of horror being more horrible when left to the imagination (where more is said when it is unsaid). Exploitation Poems becomes increasingly gory in later pages, and poems such as “Pyongyang Experiment Camp” and “The Lurid Method of Dr. Mamoto” departs from the sorority-carnage theme and re-creates in sonnets the plots of the Yellow/Oriental monster also found in the exploitation-fear-flicks genre. Magers’ uses the vehicle of poetry, the compact space of the pages and the line limitations of the form with creepy swellness, as in the poem, “Cheerleader Rout”: “Until they sleep, the lights are on. They sleep… / and then unlighted rooms come creeping red.” Then, “The Johnson’s dog is barking– / forced unquiet in the assured silence.” When the Johnson’s dog comes abarking, you know it’s going to be a long night.

Exploitation Poems is an edition of 100. A few copies were available at Pegasus the few weeks ago I got this. Otherwise, try emailing Immaculate Disciples Press (Brooklyn, NY) here.