Fauxccasional Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In Fauxccasional Poems, Daniel Scott Tysdal imagines himself into poetic voices not his own, writing to commemorate events that never occurred, for the posterity of alternative universes — and the delight of our own. From the reign of the first philosopher king once envisioned by Plato, to the twelfth-century Iroquois colonization of Europe, to Barack Obama's career as a poet, to the lasting peace to come under the rule of the Democratic Kampuchea Global Party, Tysdal envisions the paths not taken and what might have been. In these poems, the crew of the Enola Gay refuse to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, John F. Kennedy evades assassination, and Karl Marx moonlights as an agent provocateur for a capitalist consortium.
In a dizzying display of poetic insight, technical prowess, and playful parody, Fauxccasional Poems brings these alternate universes to life, forcing the reader to ponder the contingency of history and how each moment brings us to a thousand turning points. Despite our certainties, nothing is ever as it seems, and the future unfolds against our best designs. History is an unreliable vessel for the upwelling of our deepest hopes and fears, and in Tysdal's hands poetry shakes history by the lapels and shouts, "Wake up! Your time is now!"
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As alternate history poetics go, Tysdal's (The Mourner's Book of Albums) book is in many ways technically excellent, but it doesn't have much going for it besides the technical gymnastics. The collection includes a variety of forms: a sestinaiku (combining sestina and haiku), incantatory verse, binary code poems, and the more standard range of occasionals, pantoums, villanelles, couplets, and sonnets. The subject matter including the Enola Gay crew's refusal to drop their payload, the survival of J.F.K. after Jackie's death by assassin's bullet, U.S. presidents as poet historians, and Twitter as 1960s social movement tool should lend it weight and greater range. But the book rarely feels like more than an academic exercise taken to its logical conclusions. Its predictability and its oddly narrow range work against what could have been a body of poems inspiring deeper contemplation through ahistorical myth-making. Instead, what readers are left with is a work that cannot quite capture the often deeply tragic flow of history, and so replaces it with the artificial and cold comfort of unextrapolating reimaginings that lack nuance. It's a book potentially worth buying for the technical achievements but ultimately unsatisfying.
