The Hospice Orgy (Paperback)

Phillip Lee Duncan's superb poetry is the perfect companion piece to the cinematic work of Dusan Makavejev & Co., the richness of its bizarre Surrealist comedy offset by a dry Herzogian humor, personas blowing like desiccated leaves through their own narratives. Archaic wombs are "gingerbread drywall/all rotted out" while one's children are "all gristle, utterly inedible." Copernicus, pleasuring himself through his own telescope-cum-fifi, hopes to be found outside the next day, crawling with ants like Jeffrey Beaumont's "Blue Velvet" ear, "an intricate beadwork of dew and spew on my belly/my face all rhododendron." There are also devastating endings here, where lovers hang themselves from trees "outside the meaning of orchards/where there is only sign language for cider." One is able to see the tiers of spiritual enlightenment here, which resemble Robert Crumb's time-lapse etchings of a landscape that goes from idyllic to gentrified; but these witty, insightful, and brilliant poems are not content to be a trajectory: they settle into each of their haunted, uneasy hostels for the night (which include, in art and unfortunately in real life, their late author's own body), and spin webs that collect, drain, and ingeniously re-transfuse anything, or anyone, the reader wants to throw into them.