Bad Zoo
Joseph Spece
Fathom Books, 2018
Joseph Spece’s new collection of poetry, Bad Zoo, questions, with barbed vehemence, the knowability of any self; the poems in this odd bestiary writhe with uncanny personae bent on articulating the extraordinary. Spece’s aesthetic lies far outside the mainstream of contemporary American poetry, in line with Fathom Books’ mission to publish texts “fit to meet—or be—the Gorgon: avant-garde, neo-gnostic, queer, monstrous, dire, Other.” In Bad Zoo, Spece positions “a nasty, Queer, alterity; willfully ugly” against the malaise of the easy and the mundane. Even the presentation of the text, with artwork by Darren Hopes and design by Eric Westerlind, defies the conventional. Bad Zoo concerns itself less with the precincts of memory and the autobiographical lyric and more with the provinces of alienation, alteration, and embodiment, wherein ordinary words might be forged into “a pinwheel of runes // like shivs in hot gold.”
The poetry in Bad Zoo is difficult and disorienting: the subject matter desultory, the approach off-kilter, wracked, scuttling. Spece engages figures as diverse as Herculine Barbin and Jason Vorhees, Matthew Shepard and Spider-Woman. The debts the author acknowledges in the endnotes are telling: “to Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Bennett’s Pond, Vince’s THE ADRIFT OF SAMUS ARAN, Adams-Santos’ Swarm Queen’s Crown, Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and the video games Silent Hill 2 (2001) and Parasite Eve (1997).” Throughout the many erasures and blackouts in this collection, one perceives that Spece is a poet near to the wild heart of life, despite his penchant for misdirection and his aggressively eldritch style. There are also moments of unchecked beauty and quietude here, as in “Cherry Heirloom”: — / I must write / the story of / absolute doe.” For these moments alone, Bad Zoo is worth the price of admission. This is certainly not a book for every reader, but if you are interested in reading ambitious, truly outré poetry, then Bad Zoo is a must-read for you. As Spece notes in “Lovely Colloquy”: “Transforming what’s strange is transforming.” Bad Zoo is transforming and transformative from start to finish.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018).
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