Past Due Notices by Mike James
I finished Mike James's latest, Past Due Notices, before I left on vacation, and haven't had a chance to discuss it until now. I own all but one of his previous chapbooks, so I'd read many of the poems in this "new and collected" book-length collection, before. (The subtitle is Poems 1991-2011.)
Mike James writes minimalist realism in poems that often have the effects of koans, without Japanese affectation. The chief problem with having them collected in a book, is that they shouldn't be read all at once. There should have been a ten-minute time-lock built into the book, so that you couldn't just keep turning the pages.
Some of the poems are winners on the basis of title alone: "The Witch Long Dead, Hansel and Gretel Return to the Forest", "After One Thousand Rejection Letters I Wrote this Poem Above a Public Urinal", "I Used to Dream of Becoming the Village Idiot", "In Fear of Collection Agencies".
I will note that there were at least four poems about the late Jack Wolford, including one so titled. That's a good number.
All poets should read the collection of mini-poems under the umbrella title of "The Poet's Book of Professions" (which really ought to be a picture book for adults).
And then there are the immortal lines from "Fairy Tales, Fears and the Gymnastics of Love":
also, i don't like flight attendants
i am not afraid of them
but i don't like them and that
has not been said enough
in poems
CBsIP: student manuscripts
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
Army Life in a Black Regiment: and other writings, Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Far and Near, John Burroughs
McSweeney's 23