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The Romance of Happy Workers
by
Anne Boyer (Goodreads Author)
The Romance of Happy Workers swaggers through a world of cowboys, conquistadors, comrades, and housewives with mock-Russian lyric sequences and Keatsian swoon. Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer’s poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and ser...more
Paperback, 90 pages
Published
April 1st 2008
by Coffee House Press
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ONE OF MY FAVORITE NEW BOOKS OF POETRY! I gave a copy to my boyfriend Rich who likes to dislike the conversation of poetry as much as he likes to dislike the conversation of class, especially from such a stance. It wasn't a joke gift, it was a REAL gift, and he realized it soon after he started reading it, saying he couldn't believe how much he was engaged in reading poetry. He hates poetry, which is why it's best we get together for the things we get together for, which has everything to do wit...more
TRoHW is Kansas on a Five-Year Plan, Sandburgian regional pathos run through the thresher of Brecht. If Circe'd bothered to ask the hog farm “Who Os the Os?” it’d probably desorcel the lyric like this: “Erase great. Erase poet. Erase no.”
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I honestly don't know what to rate this book. It vacillates in my mind between thrilling word-joy and dull emptiness. Such radically different responses are one of the dangers of writing that has no extractable meaning, that isn't about ideas or thoughts (however much it maps thought patterns); it's like high-wire reading, either you're exquisitely balanced with all experience heightened, or you're broken on the rocks below. There's really no middle ground where one can play mental footsies on a...more
1 like · like · see review
We laughed. They had to be kidding, but this was liberation--
we were breathing, ah down a neck, o in an eyelid, uh on a belly.
Her playfulness and the concreteness of her words in some of her more structured poems remind me a little of late Lisa Jarnot. But most of her poems are looser, and she also reminds me a little of Noelle Kocot, though she doesn't follow the endless folds of metaphor into oblivion the way Kocot does.
Or maybe she's just herself. Very strange but fun poems. Somehow I can get...more
we were breathing, ah down a neck, o in an eyelid, uh on a belly.
Her playfulness and the concreteness of her words in some of her more structured poems remind me a little of late Lisa Jarnot. But most of her poems are looser, and she also reminds me a little of Noelle Kocot, though she doesn't follow the endless folds of metaphor into oblivion the way Kocot does.
Or maybe she's just herself. Very strange but fun poems. Somehow I can get...more
Favorites:
"Home on the Range" (And you will lick my Laura Ingalls.)
"A Twilight of Minor Poets" (staring out windows / thinking some thing or other about light.)
"Grip" (The horizon knows what / It is saying here.)
Poundcast (You seem to remember NOTHING.)
The Relacion of Anne Boyer (I, Anne Boyer, who hate everything, love YOU!)
"Home on the Range" (And you will lick my Laura Ingalls.)
"A Twilight of Minor Poets" (staring out windows / thinking some thing or other about light.)
"Grip" (The horizon knows what / It is saying here.)
Poundcast (You seem to remember NOTHING.)
The Relacion of Anne Boyer (I, Anne Boyer, who hate everything, love YOU!)
I really wanted to like this, but it just wasn't my thing I guess. I feel like an idiot because everyone else gives it five stars... I'm done with star ratings on here, I know that much.
Fittingly for the 21st c.: a shift away from the Family Romance to the Political Romance. This book is sassy in its interrogations. I like it.
I liked Anne Boyer's chapbook "Art is War" although it is not poetry in the way this book is. At first I didn't like this because I was thrown off by the language and wasn't seeing the way the language was being mixed up and used in a new way. Once I realized this I reread all the poems and I really, really like the book. And a plus that she lives in Kansas.
Hell to the yes Anne Boyer for her smirky yawp at the piddly moon. Just when I started to worry about whether poetry's meta-isms are just masturbatory, it hit me: masturbating is great. Of course! We should all be rubbing them out with as much gusto as Boyer in this awesome book.
This book is great. The voice is lyrical, eclectic, and sincere, and I loved the confluence of subjects. Well-organized too--I thought the last section was the strongest of the book!
Anne Boyer
Anne Boyer
now reading again...this is an important and amazing new book for all but i do believe it also proves that even post-post poets can bring something entirely different and new to the field of poetics. Boyer's book is daring, sexy, snarkey, playful, fresh and will make you write!
I'm too old-fashioned in my poetical taste to let Boyer stand out. Most of the time I just had no idea what she was trying to say.
Surrealistic rural apocalypses?
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