Today’s Zine Review: Dollar Stories, An Anthology of Montreal Poetry

Today’s zine review is from Issue 5 of Broken Pencil, published in the summer of 1997.

chap-book / 16 pages / main creator: ibolya kaslik (editor) / $? / 5613 St. Urbain, Montreal, PQ, H2T 2X2

The first poem in Dollar Stories is a real beaut. It starts off: “i am driving in the fast car/and i am racing down the slow lane/and i haven’t got a license/but i don’t care/because it’s high noon/and i’ve got the radio/blasting/and you are history pal/i think/as i pass the volkswagen.”

Then something bad happens to the narrator and the wisdom of driving fast in the slow lane at high noon with the radio blasting becomes suspect and that’s where the poem should stop, with the reader feeling a sense of malaise at something that seemed pretty innocent at first. Unfortunately the poem goes on to nail things down: “and i’m driving the slow car/and the trucks are whizzing by me/and i am a slug on the freeway.” Still, this is probably the best poem in the anthology. The rest are filled with “the swollen language of cosmetics,” that b.d. harrington talks about in his poem “So nearly overwhelmed.”

Somewhere beneath the surface of these poems there lurks the harsh reality of bad skin, but there’s too much makeup to be really sure. Some of the lines almost make some sort of sense — but when you simply slap together a bunch of lines that verge on sentience, I’m not sure the effect is particularly satisfying or emotionally worthwhile.

Take this for instance: “you are dragging me into your coma/without provision/when all I want to do is set fire to your tent!/throw away all your trinkets!/walk through your smoke with the great eye of my mother!” Sounds sort of neato, but what does it mean? There a couple of very good poems in here, but in the end, it feels like most of the poets here think that “words/on paper dropped loose will/tie themselves up and around/each other at last.” Words get dropped the way you might drop acid and then wait to see what develops.

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