Reviewed by Michael Arnzen
Dilbert meets Edward Gorey.
That's Mark McLaughlin's Your Handy Office Guide to Corporate Monsters: a curious little chapbook just twelve poems long released from Richard Geyer, Publisher in Spring 2002. It's hilariously successful. And it's small enough to fit in your back pocket as you walk from cubicle to cubicle, diagnosing the office drones.
McLaughlin -- who has been a leading voice in surrealist humor in the small press for the past ten years -- is as well known for his witty charm and performative fiction readings as he is for being the editor of The Urbanite magazine. In the UK fantasy scene and among diehard US horror fans, he's known mostly for his short fiction, which has a tendency to combine Lovecraftian imagery with hilarious (and often perverse) comedy (for example, in a story posted on Horrorfind.com called "When We Was Flab," McLaughlin unleashed a Cthulhu version of Lennon and McCartney on the internet that earned him several Bram Stoker Award nominations). In Corporate Monsters, you get a great example of his voice and a generous sampling of his clever wit in poetic form. And it's only two bucks.
Corporate Monsters is a book written in the tradition of the "grotesque" -- a catalogue of character studies that accurately captures the way a specific setting influences its occupants. But Corporate Monsters is also much more than that. It relies on an ingenious premise: that the people who populate any given corporation are really freaks of neurotic monstrosity who have not only sold out, but who are also out to get you. As the front and back cover illustrations suggest, these creatures staff (and infest) an imaginary corporation named "Hell Co." -- and clearly, Mark McLaughlin knows what it's like to be enslaved -- and mutated -- by big business ideology.
Take "The Enthusiraptor," for example. He's the typical hyperactive ninny who will "gush all over you / and before you know it, you'll be doing / whatever it is you're good at / for your company. For free. / . . . And you won't enjoy it any more." Recognize the type? It'll be immediately identifiable to any poet reading this who has been tapped to lend their creative writing skills to, say, write directions for the staff copy machine. In McLaughlin's world, the Enthusiraptor isn't just a moron -- it has evil intent: it's "a vampire / eager to suck the fun / out of your life."
While the poetic language I've been citing might not pack much of a punch, much of it does, and McLaughlin clearly uses poetry to unleash his creative unconscious, venting what are likely to be everyone's frustrations with go-nowhere work through comedic horror, throwing out madcap barbs with deadly accuracy. The rhyme, when it appears, is subtle and often slant ("The Finnickyfoofoo is very picky / about the work others do, / and always demands absolute / perfection"). But McLaughlin smartly represses any desire to refine the form of his grotesques or wax poetic in sonnets . . . formal design would clearly inhibit his humorous insights.
The genius of this book is in each monster's inventive title and modus operandi. You get character studies of self-explanatory monsters like "The Smiling Gladhander" and "The Waffler" side by side with the "Fumigorgon" (a health food freak with noxious breath) and "The Spittylicker" (a clerk who obsessively licks fingers when turning pages). And I won't be a "Blabberblort" and ruin the surprising nature of "The Normotron" or "The Potbellied Smirkleflab" -- you'll just have to read this book and find out what they are on your own.
Chances are, you already know them.
I don't mean to sound like an Enthusiraptor, but I really mean it when I say you're going to love this little book. It's one of my favorite poetry chapbooks of the year so far. The premise is clever and the price is cheaper than, say, an espresso at Starbucks or a box of toner. The pocket-sized design is just right for slipping inside your blazer and tossing on the boardroom table before the big meeting. If they get the joke, the contents are certain to have your coworkers looking at themselves a little more closely, whether CEO or secretary. You'll want to pick up a dozen or so of these stocking stuffers to hand out at the office Christmas party. Just keep your eyes peeled for the ones who lick their fingers before they turn the cover.
Chimes in the Unconscious: Quanta: Award-Winning Poems, by Bruce Boston
Reviewed by Michael Arnzen
7/8/02
If you've never read Bruce Boston's poetry, I'd normally say "shame on you," but instead I'll just look the other way and ask you to quietly purchase a copy of this book and read it quickly, before anyone else finds out. Because you need to read Bruce Boston, especially if you have any desire to be a SF poet. Boston has been defining the genre of speculative poetry for twenty years or more -- and finally we have Quanta, a book that enumerates the core elements of that definition.
Boston's Quanta is a collection of his award-winning poetry. Again, with emphasis: this entire collection is composed of award-winning poems. I cannot think of another writer in the genre who could fill a book of short pieces with award-winners, with the exception, perhaps, of Harlan Ellison. Indeed, Boston is something of a Harlan Ellison of poetry -- a living legend, an outspoken proponent of literary quality, and an embodiment of a '60s aesthetic that combines wonder with a longing for future possibility.
Reading through Boston's Quanta was for me something akin to poring over a photo album: I was nostalgically reliving my first experience with many of the poems (and relishing the poems I'd always wanted to read, but didn't have access to), remembering just how innocent I was before Boston blew my mind when I discovered him in the small press. And here he managed to do it all over again, knocking my well-worn socks off. You can't read Boston's Quanta without realizing that his work stands the test of time.
In an opening comparison to Van Gogh's rendering of "Starry Night," Andrew Joron's glowing introduction to the book praises Boston's "expressionistic" writing style, in which "words no longer function merely as record-keeping devices, but become a kind of darkly luminescent substance applied to the white surface of the page." Boston accomplishes this through his emphasis not so much on what words mean, but how they sound and, consequently, ring the chimes we hang in our unconscious.
Indeed, this very modus operandi may be at work in the somewhat self-reflexive poem, "The Nightmare Collector" -- winner of the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award in 1987. This poem generates a creepy effect by using second person. The reader is put in the position of an innocent sleeper, visited by a dark stranger wearing a mysterious dark coat: "From the endless slashes / in his voluminous greatcoat / you can feel the heat / of captured bodies / invade your rumpled bed / with delirium and fever; / you can smell a brassy sediment of tears. You can hear the pulse / and thump of unborn shadows, / a dense hysteric fugue." These sounds conjure the very nightmare that the visitor hopes to gather into his dark "greatcoat."
This is just one brilliant example of Boston's dark vision in the collection, and there are plenty of others -- ranging from the dark fantasy of "Return to the Mutant Rain Forest" (another Rhysling winner, this time co-written with Robert Frazier) to the charmingly dark humor poem, "Old Robots are the Worst" (which won the Asimov's Reader's Award).
One of my favorites in Quanta is "Confessions of the Body Thief," which successfully compresses a novel-sized premise into a long poem of 143 lines. "Body Thief" is about a soul who hops from body to body, living another person's life over and over, but "like a raindrop on a window / that reflects the room beyond / can never find a passage / through the surface of the pane." The poem manages to capture a speculative concept, rend the magical into a tragic and all-too-human viewpoint, and even sneak in a little metafictional poke at what it is that readers, too, do.
Quanta's range is remarkable. Because it spans so much time, it can take snapshots of recurring motifs in Boston's prodigiously varied work. For example, Quanta contains two poems each from his series of "Spacer" astronaut poems and his series of "Accursed Wives" poems. The latter series was so popular with readers that Boston himself admits in the introduction to "Curse of the Shapeshifter's Wife" that he had "painted himself into a corner" by writing so many of them. (To wit: 35 poems and 5 short stories, all collected in his book, The Complete Accursed Wives (recently released as an e-book on fictionwise.com)). Here we get not only the Shapeshifter's Wife but also "The Curse of the SF Writer's Wife," who goes to extreme measures in her desire to stop her husband from -- literally -- taking risky flights with his imagination every time she turns her back.
Altogether, the book collects 12 poems, each introduced individually by the author, who either explains the history of the poem, or his intention within it. Rounding out the 60+ page book is a bibliography of all Boston's writing and a short autobiographical essay, "The Making of a Speculative Poet." In the latter, the author insightfully discusses the differences between "science fiction poetry" and "speculative poetry," then attempts to explain what his poetry is about. Here, surprisingly, words fail him, so he ends simply, urging the reader to read the poems themselves. And he's right: there are plenty of lessons within Quanta. I urge you to learn them.
A collectible, necessary volume. Buy it before it's sold out.
Michael A. Arnzen teaches the writing and study of popular fiction at Seton Hill University. His horror reviews have appeared recently in The New York Review of Science Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, and Paradoxa. Arnzen's novel, Grave Markings, was the recipient of both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Critics Guild Award in 1995. He invites readers to visit his home page and e-poetry experiment.