Deck of Deeds

by Rodrigo Toscano

Deck of Deeds is comprised of seventy poetic prose image captions (sans images) whose titles are inspired by the popular Latin American loteria card game. Written by a poet who logs in an average of ten thousand miles of air travel each month working as a union trainer and coordinator throughout the U.S., the "cards" reflect a dizzying array of cultural-geographic locations, each one acting as a scene-setter for highly dystopian portraits of "people" caught in a tangle of industry-specific "predicaments." Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2012

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far this is making me feel A) like how I felt when I was a teenager listening to Rage Against the Machine and B) How I felt when I was in my twenties watching Dennis Miller. It's the sensation that this collection is alternating between biting wit and more well-tread rhetorical ground, if only I knew all the political shorthand and didn't have to look up every other word. There's a piece about the joy of masturbation as developed by the first amphibious species, honed by early primates and perfected by college students who hide porn on their hard drives ("El Organismo"). And yes, it is totally worth the price of admission. At the other end of the spectrum, an anthropomorphized Big Brother writes a letter to his Sister about how funny it is to exploit Mexicans ("El Ambicioso"). To me, this sort of satire isn't as interesting -- the clever trick, the jaunt into absurdism, is perhaps more clever than the payoff of the content itself, especially if its punditry is aimed at pretty easy and obvious targets. I'm sure this fluctuates with the reader's own political perspective -- if the buttons Toscano is pushing are your buttons too, then his rage will fuel your own.
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Two-thirds of the way through now; I may be getting more accustomed to the density of Toscano's prose,but I'm also noting a shift in the subject matter, from political commentary into social/academic critique. A send-up of graduate student artist statements by replacing all the notes of self-reflection with made-up babytalk made me laugh out loud, but talk about writing for a narrow audience, amirite?

Another great dialogue-based piece between two modes of discourse is equally niched. But others, such as a letter from a patient to a doctor as an allegory for colonialism (yes), is funny, smart, and relatively accessible.
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Final thoughts: Really good. Much liked.

What occurred to me in the final third was that there was so much in this book; that each story was not only dense (which is obvious) but also hypercondensed; I found myself stopping to unpack a two-page story that (maybe?) was about discovering that the nagging feeling that you haven't discovered your life's purpose is easily remedied by dying ("La Proletaria") for a good twenty minutes before moving on.

And that thought led to another thought, which is that this is a book that, for as compulsively paper-thin as the audience for some of its stories might be, when taken as a whole is a collection that uses a single toolset -- a sort of hyperscientific, anthropological lexicon of cynicism -- to not only explore all kinds of subjects, but also all kinds of linguistic, narrative, and psychological deconstruction. What begins as so aggressively challenging as to almost be opaque becomes a very generous text that constantly reforms and finds another way to bloom, like a hexaflexagon in book form.

And by the way, despite the shorthand on this book, the Loteria titles of its chapters don't actually refer to real images from the Loteria deck for many of the stories contained within. A real project would be to construct a new deck based on the book itself. (WHO WANTS A MASTERS THESIS?)

Good read. You should read it. Go do that now.

[Joe]

// This book is about you, you, and you, English language, and it's not happy.
// The deck of terror targets is replaced by a deck of operators in political, corporate, and cultural enterprises, acting out banal evils. Brilliant mock-heroic portraits of artists, academics, and posers, "El Autor," "Los Sociolinguisticos," "La Idealista," "El Profe." It's hard not to laugh. Hard not to see yourself in several of the types and to be scalded.
// Toscano as obsessed w/the contradictions in our actions and the radically different ethics they propose. Exposes our own love of our power of compartmentalization, the small and large erotic charges we get from putting on the mask of the enemy/power in private. From consuming secrets/information.
// This question occurred to me: Is there a fear of pleasure in these poems? Or is Toscano outlining in his anthropological/technical language which describes a strange pataphysical future/alternate reality how capitalism has appropriated the pleasure and trespass in the name of pleasure to banal/bad ends?

"At 19, she--from one day to the next--decided to stop smoking salvia. She also made a decision not to pursue a career in Industrial Workflow Methods. Her new interest was her own complex socio-cultural subjectivity" ("La Investigadora" 110)

"The fact that he's dead doesn't horrify them anymore" ("El Autor" 90)

"Ditching a whole week of classes in the middle of his first semester at Oberlin to spend it in Belarus with his dorm building's maintenance man is a dicey proposition to be sure" ("El Psicologo" 69)

"I remain still for about ten minutes, holding in the small lake of yambara-corumbara-salah inside me. Then, in a gesture of newfound tooo-ooon-jajajajaja empowerment, I let gush out all of the pleasure that I harbored to myself (for myself) for all the spectators to either critically evaluate, be disturbed by, or simply enjoy" (51)

[Bradluen]

My word this is a mean book—mean toward anyone and anything that exhibits a hint of bourgie pretension, including universes, molecules, and (as all parties are aware) anyone who reads a small press poetry book in the 2010s. To the extent that one doesn't throw one's hands up and start reading dead animal poems, useful.