Jerome Sala, Glop: Poems

 

from A Guide to TikTok
                                                —After Kenneth Koch 

Look at this TikTok video.
There is a tiny dog in the foreground.
There is a tiny dog in the background.
The tiny dog in the background yells
to the tiny dog in the foreground:
“Hey, what is your name?
What is your name?
What is your name?”
The tiny dog in the foreground
finally hears the tiny dog in the background.
The tiny dog in the foreground yells back:
“Toby!
My name is Toby!”
The tiny dog in the background yells back:
“Fuck you, Toby.”

I have to admit, upon opening New York City poet Jerome Sala’s latest, Glop: Poems (BlazeVox Books, 2026), I caught the first poem, and was immediately prompted to share a photo of it with at least half a dozen friends via text. As an opening poem, there is something quite remarkable about it, including the absurd ridiculousness of the narrative. The poem strikes, clearly. The first full-length collection (unless there’s something else I’ve missed) since the publication of How Much? New and Selected Poems (Beacon NY: NYQ Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Glop: Poems presents itself in three titled clusters of shorter poems—“Searching,” “Headlines” and “Poetic Economy”—Sala’s is an approach to narrative lyric oddities and the surreal that connect his work to the work of other contemporary poets such as American poet Ron Padgett and Canadian poet Stuart Ross, akin to a particular flavour from within the New York School. “I know where I’m going / when I walk with a zombie.” begins the short poem “In the Key of ‘I’.” “Once I was a male war bride / now I am an idiot, walking / through an ice storm.” With poems for or after Kenneth Koch and M.S. Merwin, and further referencing Huckleberry Hound, Marianne Moore, Charles Darwin, Vallejo, William Bronk, Auden, Joy Division, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, Blade Runner and the Fantastic Four, Sala writes to and through his literary heroes and pop culture icons, individuals both real and invented that figure heavy across his imagination. His poems are populated, set as responses to his immediate world, one that lays heavy in books and other media. “the dead stay that way / only momentarily,” begins the poem “Football World Reacts to Famous Coach Getting Fired,” “soon they command / the attention of suitors // a married corpse / is a born-again value // those under the whip / of the resurrected boss / scoff at the rumor / of his demise // they can feel his new life — / he takes it out of their hides [.]”

The key to Sala’s poems is almost one of perspective, of perception; offering poems-as-little-essays that each work against any kind of expectation, but also each work toward a kind of narrative inevitability. Once the poem lands at the end, the distance travelled makes complete internal sense, even if one could never have imagined the ending from the beginning. “What’s the opposite of a still life?” he asks, to open the poem “Smokin’.” “Maybe the Museum of Television and Radio / where I’m watching old commercials / for cigarettes. These elaborate plugs / look like ads for psychedelic drugs. / A woman lights up and her yard / becomes a blooming meadow. She’s pleased: / above her brain are budding trees.” Where might this poem finally land, you ask? His poems are inquisitive and quietly joyful, offering poem-bursts not always short but certainly immediate, composing a layering of lines that almost overwhelm at times, piling observational lick upon observational lick like an old pro, wildly inventive and intelligent, forever fiercely young at heart.

Bladeless Fan

The breeze propels itself
as all things do
from out of the void. 

In this case an oval —
a form that recalls
the oblong box
of Poe’s story. 

But instead of a corpse
the oblong fan
registers the absence
of any body
or any blade
offering instead
a zero —
that breather
between positive and negative. 

A moment of
the new
from which
a cool wind blows.