VI Fictions by Chris Pusateri
(Gong Press, 2006)

Reviewed by Travis Jeppesen


Chris Pusateri’s VI Fictions is really a book of prose poems. Actually, it’s pointless to make these distinctions.

Pusateri has something that most writers nowadays lack – a poetics. It’s important to have a poetics, whether you write poetry or prose. It’s important to make distinctions, too; to quote Pusateri, “I’ll loan you my love, but not my indifference.”

Police are everywhere these days. The poet’s role is to be an anarchist cop. Pusateri clearly realizes this, but he doesn’t shove it down our throats. Instead, he cleverly gives us a job mopping up the detritus of fillintheblank’s stewage. He writes about hardcore anal fucking with the ease of someone who’s been inside. I’m not talking about ability, but the way it’s put down on paper. Grand in the way thoughts matter, elastic like entropy.

Published in an edition of 100 by Gong Press. Don’t fuck up by not getting one of these things. gongpress@earthlink.net