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The Furious Cock - by Michael Muhammad Knight.
2002. 270 pages. For price and information: Michael Muhammad Knight, Email: mikail316@hotmail.com

This be a novel, a first novel, a free novel, an independent novel, which is free of the stuff of the novel that impressions with prison that form. This novel is propelled by incident after incident arriving like bits of emails from some dorm room, fragments and yet narrative and thrusting itself ever onward in its tale of young man in life. It is by the young novelist Michael Muhammad Knight whose picture is on the back cover with typewriter in a dumpster. His call is heard from the garbage of existence, American college existence. This image works because Knight via the writing captures the tossed away sense of self and sticking, stinking chicken bone, rotting green bean garbage feel and essence of the disposed of time spent in those aimless years of attempts at college education. Not detailed before, as far as I know, so truly extensively and capturing, detailing, defining the weeks and months, and years, semester after semester, of those in college confusion questions of what is this all about in the philosophic pointing out the ridiculousness of the supposed college experience with its obvious stupid human interactions. The Furious Cock then is a defining instance in the existence of American youth entering adulthood. And attempting to locate a purpose a reason to be in the midst of a culture pushing all into college for your own good, sake, etc. In this novel, this manifestation of unknowingness and wondering and pondering via incident and character interaction of a young artist wondering what is this place, this society, world I live in and what am I supposed to do in college which leads to what I am supposed to do in my, so-called, life?. Knight has found his way in this prose and to this prose and it is a singular achievement that he captures and cages this odd time in all our lives when we embark upon our entire lives still not knowing what it is all about and yet not comfortable with this notion that we might never know and that this is it, just an endless interaction with strange beings upon our planet. And editors of the world of poets and writers and novelists and looking for some original writing see Knight's book and write him and get some stuff hot off his typer of the dumpster.

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The Book of Chaps - by Lytton Bell.
32 pages $2.00. 24th Street Irregular Press, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, CA. 95816. broadsides@sacfreepress.com

I was reading this book in the bathtub and saying to myself that with titles like Confessions of a Cum Spittoon, Lack of a Lesbian Experience, and How to Seduce Me - that Lytton Bell has got to get immediately in touch with Cait Collins, Cheryl Townsend and lots of other small press women cause she is out there explaining the reality of woman's reality, like giving head fast in the morning because she has gotta get out the door to go to work. Frank, candid, the poems numbered by which lover inspired it, each work proposes a memory, a tiny scar of love, which is its lust. Oh delight, she moves about in the poem in lingerie of dusk and shadow with the knife of hearts ready to pluck your fig leaf off Adam and leave your penis a solitary cricket singing in the night.

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James Dean's Diaries - by Arthur Winfield Knight.
36 pp, 2002. $3.00. 24th Street Irregular Press, 1008 24th St., Sacramento, CA. 95816. broadsides@sacfreepress.com

A line in one of the poems, a poem called Nick, in this book rings? "Life broke people, no matter how successful they seemed." Oh bitter sweet and lovely and lonely? these poems by Knight about Dean and Natalie, Nick (the director of Rebel) A Time's Square junky like Herbert Hunkie (perhaps), Billy the Kid, Marilyn, but mostly about James Dean and Pier, mostly about James Dean? "The waves wash huge pieces of rotting kelp onto the beach in the rusty moonlight. I like it because it's so lonely." The lines ring and ring and saturated with thick Hollywood aloneness, which seems to be something all these characters represent and is something that Arthur Knight brilliantly captures in this series of works. Of course these people are no longer real people. They are the stuff of American loneliness the mirrors and images that all of us, the populace, desires but fears because of the absolute desolation that becomes an American Icon. An American lonely is the bright burning night of success that each of these spectacular solo moths circles around, tighter, around the movie light bulb until in a few sparks only ashes.

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All Weekend with the Lights On - by Mark Wisniewski.
2001. 154 pp. Leaping Dog Press, PO Box 222605 Chantilly, VA 20153-2605. $14.95

Ear for the spoken language got Mark Wisniewski and the ability to record it and not sound to this ear fake makes these stories even better and he is not recording his dream of the sophisticated language of a Brit lord or, God helps us, a Professor of writing! Mark, I imagine, is the kinda guy you find in your mind from when you used to hang out at the gas station or the roller rink or the bar tender at Terry and Dan's or Pete's Hilltop, or Howie's or Stankowski's and he is not a guy you remember from bars that might be called The Lilly Pad or Way Cool Sport Bar. But you might remember him out of the corner of your eye and you told him stories and you could not pick him our of a crowd but you are in HIS imagination, an imagination that has stationed itself in the midst of lives of the regular, mostly boring, trauma filled lives of people you see in supermarkets. Yeah - these stories are the stories of people you see in supermarkets, somewhat disformed (not the art of his short stories) - the people, who are a bit fat, a bit dirty, not unattractive but not very beautiful. The type of people who once drove their cars into viaducts or trains, whose mother's jump out of sky-scrapers, who husbands leave them with three children, etc. So these stories then ring true, true in the sense that somehow in some magnificent way he, Wisneiwski, has molded these under interesting people in to a prose that accurately identifies all the things in their shopping carts, like taco sauce (hot), and Little Debbie's Hot Cross Buns, and Colgate and the such like slicing off a finger. It is a frightening thing what this writer can see, as if he were peering through a bee-bee hole in the plate glass window of your heart, soul and mind and found that in there all the blood or broken hearts and souls and brains were not much more that a pile of laundry or stale rolls of reality, Popsicle sticks. Yes, in there, in the soul and heart and guts we are all very strange individuals. Once Wiz let's YOU peak at his peep-show the juices wont stop.

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Bogg. No. 71. - John Elsberg - editor.
422 N. Cleveland St. Arrilington, VA. 22201. Write with dollars of ink.

First I am gunna say that if readers of this review don't know about Bogg, now 71 issues old, I am gunna say?"Where the fuck have you been?" Now let's get on to patting John Elsberg on the back. Let's get on to buying him a drink or an egg salad sandwich. Elsberg has Christ been focused on the form of writing that is dear to us HOLD readers, and Bukowski readers, and those of us who understand about working class writing and class issues in America and know that the academy keeps out the dirty, working class poetry of pop bottles and skunks eating the tulip bulbs, and the readers of small press books and mags that have filled our otherwise empty gas tanks for dozens of years. Dozens. This is a thing of commitment. This is what love is. Yes, an issue of a little magazine of poetry 71 issues old is love. He has as editor and lover out lived most of your mirages and mortgages and the kids that are now long gone from your first marriage. Well well, Elsberg has been at it longer than that. Bogg has lasted longer than most of the countries in Africa! Elsberg program of writing has been focused from the beginning and like light it has remained focused from the earth to the far away stars from the beginning, beaming. He is an example of solid and lively and real small press life. I mean you don't really think that George Bush II sends him a check! Hell No. I mean Hell NO. This is a legitimate passion. He is a metaphor of stability and love. Elsberg, Hello. I hope these people hear. Elsberg, we met in Pittsburgh once, 20 years ago. At Hemingway's. And I am still a cowardly lamb in the presence of your long elaborate sentence of Bogg shouting out throughout the world and eternity and on Mars! Sir, it is people like you sir, that stirs the heart and imagination and makes poetry a place where all classes of people may have, might have, do have a voice. Thanks.

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