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Brandon Downing, whose Lake Antiquity beguilingly combined painstaking full-color collage with painstaking found poetry and painstaking visual bravado, returns with this collection of new poems, his fourth. You'll be laughing about flotsam, you'll be crying about jetsam. There is nothing but supernaturally canny vernacular to hold on to in these poems, but there is excessive cultural material to dream about.
Wait for me, Raymond Carver!
You piece of shoot!
The girls are too solo, not herd things,
Dirty butt, jelly-jar weed-heads,
Tiny chiggers leaving huge welts,
That is the world waits in the woods.
Me, I can't buy enough Giclee prints
To cover the guile accreting on my walls!
What was that all about btw,
Those donut bushes and Sprite
Ladders running up over the defensive
Walls of our new youth clinic? WTF?
Brandon Downing is an artist and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area, now living in New York City. His collections include The Shirt Weapon, Dark Brandon, and Lake Antiquity.
"Mellow Actions is the product of a Rimbaudean surrealist technique (because in spite of what the facts say, “mellow actions” is, in our hearts, a rearrangement of the letters in the word “illuminations”) getting velcroed to a vernacular syntax at violent and joyous odds with the conspiracy between literacy and interiority...Mellow Actions posits, in each of its many linked verses (think Japanese cooperatively group-written renga linked verse circa 1680 with its group dynamics of being not very cooperative at all and often most concerned with mutual skulduggery and sabotage), a comic speech that equates up-to-the-minute/over-colloquial/oversharing-prone/Internet-entangled attention-and-communication patterns with the proverbial “eternal Now,” a venerable, archetype-less, paradisiacal inner space —And in so doing, Mellow Actions ouroborizes the dialectic between Transcendence and Proximity (or, sez Emerson, between logos and ethos, Power and Will, etc.) that is endemic to much American poetry if not poetry in summa." —Paul Ebenkamp, Jacket2