Click through to read the full review of Michael Peter’s VAAST BIN, the thirtieth in this full-press review of Calamari books.
I don’t get Michael Peters’s VAAST BIN. Reading it made me feel like a red-faced kid swinging at a bully who was easily holding him at arm’s length, palm on my forehead, the arc of my fists grwing wider and wider. I was groping, straining, trying to figure out what was going on there. Unfortunately, I never did.
Perhaps it is my lack of math function skills. There is all of numbers about Peters’s VAAST BIN and I knew the book needed me to research, to google or wikipedia or otherwise learn before I read, but I wanted to approach the book honestly, from my own perspective, one with little math terminology. I wanted to see what would happen. What happened was that I was mostly lost for the duration of this poetry collection.
I did catch phrases that I loved, and I did enjoy some of the words that waved over me, but I didn’t get the full scope of what Michael Peters was doing, and I didn’t understand what VAAST BIN was, and I probably fell short of the book itself. Nonetheless, good phrases are good phrases, and there was this:
night,
ravenous with idle tendrils
drinks with cylindrical tongues, cupped
and this:
the bin of localized meaning
frothy, hexed, numbed
anesthetized white storms swarming to the lip
of each black chasm
repeating its end
in the disservice of its own closure
and this:
you, cloven vomer, coming apart with in seams—
to lett. numbers lie in their feral sequences
to impart the separation of this thing
touching our lungs—
I would worry if I loved every book I read in a catalog as large as Calamari Press’s. I would worry that I was overcome by fancy. I would worry that I wasn’t being genuine in my reaction to their books, that I was flirting instead of evaluating. But, Michael Peters’s VAAST BIN takes away my concern for this. I was lost, and saddened, but sometimes that happens in life, and we get over it, and we move on, and we no doubt learn from all of this.
Get bullied yourself here.
Next up: 3RD BED [6]
Today, this is all I can muster.
