Personationskin

Hilarity in the vault! A man without a face and an ever-shifting position on things: sheer terror and comedy follow "where everywhere, divides." -- Fanny Howe "To read Karl Parker's poems is to revel in the tremendous reach of a mind that, more than any other I've read (more than John Clare, more than Khlebnikov or Kharms or Huerta) can render me awed at the realization that we, each of us, has a person inside our skins with us. Parker enacts this phenomelogical remembering with such a wit and lyricism, and such a grief, that I believe him likely one of the smartest, saddest, funniest writers alive. He is without doubt one of my favorite writers. I have been following his work for years. And so will people for years to come." -- Gabriel Gudding

Publishers Weekly

Parker is one of the oddest poet’s you’re likely to meet. With a hyperactive sense of humor and an irreverence to match, Parker creates poems that push so hard at their own boundaries, they’re likely to explode at any moment. “REJOICE EVERYTHING IS TRUE,” says Parker, and he almost means it—this debut is full of unsustainable assertions: “LOAFING IS NOT JUST AN ARTFORM,/ IT IS ARTFORM”; “I sit in my window, a talking monkey”; “Night’s nothing but a low hum from the wiregrid of goodbyes/ and getwells we are.” No poet has had this kind of simultaneous reverence for and disregard of the poetic tradition since Bill Knott. Many of Parker’s poems take the form of little disjunctive stories (“My name is Regina I wear glasses// and sometimes only one shoe./ This is my house”), while others are frustrating and entertaining lists of mostly capitalized blips and stream of consciousness observations: “PLAYING TO THE PEANUT GALLERY// TAKING A PISS ON A PILE OF URINAL ICE IN DUBLIN.” Some readers will slam this book shut as soon as they open it; others will keep it open in their heads forever. (Jan.)