A Thousand Devils

Poetry. "If an ancient had an epileptic seizure, he was possessed by a thousand devils. When he regained consciousness, the devils were driven out by a healer. The devils had to go someplace. In this case they have gone into the poems.The poems roar or whisper balefully from the sand or from the wind, or stir unseen in the coiling silence; or fall from the heavens like crushing incubi.With their dismal fooleries they trasform our worthless days and disentagle a thousand evils, and they are indeed, incredible"-Nada Gordon. "Toward some crooked vein of empathy/ A subsong marries its twin in reply:/ Can there be a code joined to right or ruth/ Adequately, this star-freaked wide isthmus?" -from "The Lollard's Remonstrance."

"'Be equal to squirming out of a crisis and you will seep purulently through deafening goiters into wheatfields, kingdoms, caverns,' Mohammad advises in his provocative, tumultuous, sometimes fascinating sophomore effort. A poetry-world blogger (limetree.ksilem.com) and critic of experimental writing, as a poet Mohammad (Deer Head Nation) is a sometime exponent of Flarf, a poetic style emphasizing deliberately gauche, clumsy or distasteful language, sometimes with the aid of Internet searches. Though only a few years old, Flarf has already found its way into college courses, the Village Voice and even the BBC, which interviewed Mohammad about it. His new volume may or may not count as Flarf proper, but it certainly demonstrates the aggressive responses to all conventions, the hostility and frustration toward mainstream meanings and mainstream media, and the sometimes exhilarating parody, which Flarf (along with predecessors from William Burroughs to Bruce Andrews) manifests. 'I like to stay in the dark shadows of the garage, where it's a felony to lactate,' 'Death the Comedian' says, while another poem portrays 'the cross-section of the frontal lobe/ sauted in battery acid.' Such corrosive images, spliced together with dissonant, freer-than-free-jazz rhythms, let Mohammad deliver his striking 'blast of/ antimatter' alongside a heap of literary-historical jokes — 'Yet once more the frying tricycles/ And yet once more the new wave muttonchops.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of THE FRONT (Roof Books, 2009) BREATHALYZER (Edge Books, 2008), A THOUSAND DEVILS (Combo Books, 2004), and DEER HEAD NATION (Tougher Disguises, 2003). He edits the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln and teaches literature and creative writing at Southern Oregon University.