It's too Late for Careful

I'm looking forward to meeting C.A. Conrad in March, when he's performing in Amsterdam. Since I read A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics (Wave Books, 2012), I follow his wanderings. Also his new book, Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014) is definitely a good read. And shocking sometimes. Or, as Drew Webster is telling us in his review of this book:

"These poems are extreme, it's true. There's no way to, there’s no reason to, deny this. When Conrad explains that he wants to "create" an extreme present, he doesn't mean that the present which he creates is one that is extreme by virtue of the fact that he has bloodied his foot or inserted a plastic tube into his penis, it is extreme by virtue of the fact that we have all made it extreme—"I blame everyone when I blame / myself I'm that good a shot," he says in "Now Only 30% Taphephobic / Feeling Better by Open Holes." But, in his typical all caps approach, C.A. Conrad seems to ask us whether we can think of a more extreme circumstance than the ones we find ourselves in now, and if that's true, don't extreme circumstances require extreme measure to deal with them?" --Drew Webster, Colorado Review

More on Ecodeviance -- samples and reviews -- on this page.