Bedside Guide

Spent a decadent morning sitting half on top of a space heater while waiting for an oil change, eating Tastykakes, and reading The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel. First read-through favorites include Zachary Schomburg's prose poems (one of which not only makes me want to vacuum, but makes me want deep, deep wall-to-wall carpet); Aaron Belz's factotum poems; "To His Penis," Paul Jones's translation/interpretation of a medieval Welsh poem (in thumping rhymed couplets of loose tetrameter: auger who drives deep below/leather veined lavender-blue...gnarled yet graceful, a goose neck,/Hard nail, you left my home wrecked), Jilly Dybka's "I have married a crow" (the slant rhyme of turquoise with disguise, brothers with feathers--and that last line)...Molly Arden's "Horn of Plenty", so performable one wants to deliver it fishnetted & tophatted like a ringmaster kicking off a Bedside circus (the whole book would make an excellent poetry theatre show), Bruce Covey's "Nine Ball" (please let me take you to Golden Corral someday, O my love), Shanna Compton's "Überdesigned Happy Juice", Shin Yu Pai's lethal "tie me up, tie me down" (with a brilliant use of "his/her" in the last line), Rebecca Loudon's "Sugar for St. Helens", which starts off

You want to stand right on the rim
and throw your gifts down. Well,
we can't have that. We have our fat
pink eye on you regarding the damage
an older girl can do to a younger girl
at camp...

The Guide is $12.99 at Lulu and would make a far, far better Valentine's gift than anything in this genre.