CADAVER DOGS by REBECCA LOUDON

TOM BECKETT Engages

Cadaver Dogs by Rebecca Loudon
(No Tell Books, 2008)

Putrifictions: Cadaver Dogs by Rebecca Loudon


A moment decays in its telling, tolling our evanescence. It smells unbearably sweet. Like zombie sweat.

*

we are a story problem

*

Outside our window: murderous icicles rain, points first, piercing the snow covered earth. Am I imagining the spreading red stain?

*

It's good to hide the smell
with smoke and incantations.
It even cures cancer.
Open the windows, Tom.

*

There is wildness and menace in this book. Sensuality also. I feel myself to have been addressed. I feel somewhat alarmed.

*

we'll talk again when your children
have sewn razor blades to their lips


*

These are poems palpable as blood oranges.


*

bees inside the corn husk
blatant silk
royal jelly
night swung its sugary gardenia stick

*

Not to explain or paraphrase or gloss, but to say: "Look at this!"

*

you licked yourself like a human
laughed and kept laughing


*

Cadaver Dogs howls, nips, humps and growls. It rolls in some serious shit. Sniff it out. It is a marvelous book.

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(Note: the italicized segments above are all drawn from Cadaver Dogs.)

*****

In the 1980s Tom Beckett edited and published The Difficulties, a journal which became well known for its critical issues on Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, David Bromige and Susan Howe. More recently he curated the E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S website which presented 40 in depth interviews with poets. These interviews, together with supplemental texts by each interview subject, have been published in 3 handsome volumes by Otoliths. Beckett's Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978-2006 (Meritage Press, 2006) is available from Small Press Distribution and Amazon. Additionally, Otoliths has published This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day (2008), a collection of 3 longer poems.