John Coletti
The New Normalcy

Boog Literature
351 W 24th Street, Suite 19E
NY, NY 10011-1510

About a few weeks ago, or even a month, there was a mailman hanging on our stoop when I got home. I didn’t know if he was just wasting time, but I approached him and he gave me John’s new book in an excellent crisp manila envelope- it was as if it had never even gone through the postal system, perhaps he delivered it himself. With an excellent outer and inner cover by Jonathan Allen, including some doves, dogs, and vacuum cleaners, this chappie stands out from recent books I have read. John has some poems up on the Tool site- but I never had the chance to read a sequence of his poems in the order he intended them to be read (as a longer selection). The New Normalcy is remarkable and has some tight lyric moments; while at the same time, cranking up a dissonance, which I think is a complement to the beauty of many of its lines (and often necessary in the poetry I enjoy.) There is a humor also, as in “It’s Never Too Late To Wake Up”, which has the image of a tattooed man kissing kittens. And some critical jabs at the system- “Color By Numbers Democracy”— “America’s single functioning organ / Lulled to sleep by not plugging in./

In a sense, I feel things disappearing and then appearing in the poems: “ghosts as vacuums in the roses / elegant parallels”; “glorious awkwardness / had lost its passion / “I” a place had given up / this sumptuous vacuum.” Maybe a suction dub— in fact there is a musical influence in most of the poems. Some of the shorter poems have a necessary pace and rhythm, often holding back when needed.Where with the longer ones, like “A coordinated eruption” or “Collective Lenses” (if two pages is long), there is a series of rolling images coupled with some paranoia:

Break news / In the lobby / & Don’t tell / any body / any thing / any more.

My favorites include: “Poem” (first line “love lost”,) “For Tom,” and “Way too late for sonnets.” I only wish I was at John’s reading at the La Tazza series in Philadelphia late last year- I hear it was one of his best readings. Hopefully, in the future, someone will put out a full length by Coletti, it would be a wise choice, and it is time.

ES 2002

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