Cocktails : Poems

Rating:
Summary: Ouch
Review: This book needs no words other than the ones in it. Though that would be an absurd review. The poetry is remarkably, shockingly good; unique, brazen, naked.
Some of the Cocktail Mix: body, mortality, sex, haste, despair, brutality, waste, want, and men. Disease with a voice.
Although it's not the book to do this with, because it is so intense, I read nearly straight through at once; I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop being amazed.
I loved his use of punctuation, line breaks, rhythm, alliteration, syntax, empty and full visual space.
It is beautiful poetry and it is hard.

Rating:
Summary: Happy Hour
Review: With Cocktails, D. A. Powell continues the work he began with his previous collections Tea and Lunch: examining, critiquing, lamenting, and accepting the effect of AIDS on an entire generation and subculture of men. Like Powell's other works, the poems here are marked by sudden inversions and juxtapositions. In "[when you touch down upon this earth. little reindeers]", childhood innocence and the pleasure of santa claus are demolished by the scene of rape, leading to a listing of AIDS symptom "gifts" and "a sweater." The collision of the dramatic and the inane mark Powell's work as a poetry that critiques a certain poverty of authenticity in culture. All these poems mine the inauthentic in search of a redeeming social value. Three sections explore particular avenues: "Mixology" seems to specifically address AIDS and mortality, "Filmography" revisions familiar and surprising films of the past several decades, and "Bibliography" embeds itself within the context of Biblical tradition and narrative. As a triptych, these sections cultivate an understanding of contemporary American mythologies: what we allow ourselves to believe in order to get through the day.