Wastoid
By Mathias Svalina. (Washington, DC: Big Luck Books, 2014). 154 pages.
Paperback: $14.00, ISBN# 978-1-941985-90-8.
Reviewed by Tom C. Hunley
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Last year’s Oscar for Best Picture went to a movie starring Michael Keaton playing a Michael Keaton-like character, discouraged by the artistic compromise of his Batman-like franchise, who hopes to find redemption in a Broadway production of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” I’ll leave it to film buffs to debate Hollywood’s record of picking the best movies to honor, but I do know that (a) the poetry world does an abysmal job of recognizing the best books with its equivalents of the Oscars (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award etc.) and (b) Birdman would have been a much more interesting film and Raymond Carver would have been a much more interesting writer if they talked about love the way Mathias Svalina talks about love in Wastoid, his latest book of prose poems.
Wastoid is more inventive, more engaging, and more richly-inhabited than any book honored with a big prize in recent years. It’s more entertaining than any recent movie, at times darker than any movie theater, and smoother than butter poured over popcorn. Each of the 154 prose poems, which Svalina refers to as sonnets, is entitled “Wastoid.” This mono-titling technique is something Svalina previously employed in his chapbook Creation Myths and slightly varied in his full-length Destruction Myth (both highly recommended). The first sentence in Wastoid is “The first time I met my lover he was a praying mantis” and the last sentence in the book is “Oh my lover, cunning lover, feeble lover, do not fear, fire cannot burn you.” In between, in sentence after sentence, in poem after poem, Svalina talks about love in ways you won’t come across in pop songs, in movies, or in poetry collections awarded prizes by committees more interested in exchanging favors or supporting fashionable causes than in recognizing the presence of authentic poetry.
Svalina has an uncanny ability to invent extravagant figures of speech, disorienting metaphors that make readers question received ways of talking about love while opening them up to new ways. “My lover is a vacant church. I am the nearly empty gas tank inside a city bus” begins one poem. “My lover is a paper airplane a boy let fly inside the Guggenheim” begins the next. One of the poems begins “My lover has been stung by every insect on the planet. The worst sting, he claims, is from a common wooden rocking horse. I am a common wooden rocking horse. I have no idea where my stinger is & am too apprehensive to ask my lover as it may remind him of the fact that I could sting him again.” The J. Geils Band told us that love stinks, but Svalina has corrected them: love stings. So does this book. Read it with a lover. Let it sting both of you over and over.
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Tom C. Hunley is Poemeleon's Book Review Editor