the fugacity of life’s
pleasures/infatuate, fatty cutlet!
heck yes yer ghost gets
hosed au jus
smear of nude glucose &
closer
garçon got fat gathered
all good
hot on hormonal goo rune
he-man spit dip, lick ich
hickey-sigil doh!
dewy-glee today o throne
me! crush all
muscle-scruff, organic ultra
facial toner, de-
oderant, gas-x, xanax, loose
a rude
toot, fruit-of-the-loom
hunk snooze
in ruddy bloom, lube up
some silicone
props, pop-top &
pivot dip anoint
oozing fffffth induce
adieu
smock off blithe oil for men
prepare
barbican barbasol barbarella,
charméd waters burn
Decatur, Georgia poet Shelley Feller’s electrifying full-length poetry debut is
Dream
Boat (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2020), a polyvocal
explosion of fragments, overlapping high-speed accumulations and blurring text.
There is an enormous amount of play here, blending visual elements of the text
with a rollicking sound gymnastic, reminiscent of works by Canadian poets
Adeena Karasick,
Louis Cabri,
Chris Turnbull and even
Marcus McCann. “blotto-blotto
plunder yonder lubber
what err a body weathered seas-me
other,” they write, as part of the poem “@melvillestomb.” Feller’s is a collage-lyric
of incredible flexibility and maneuverability, moving at the speed of texting in
an assemblage of poems that cohere into a uniquely singular, book-length poem. Feller’s
Dream Boat utilizes the rhythm of white space and sexual being, a
sing-song push to emerge from a restrictive self into an actualized self, writing
to remove the self-loathing forced upon through external forces into a more
open acceptance. Feller writes negotiating the politics and semantics of gender
and transition from the human, guttural body in a musical, magical tenor, and I
can’t imagine a better example of Toronto poet bpNichol’s sense of “serious
play” than Feller’s
Dream Boat. This is a remarkable, rich and powerful collection,
debut or otherwise. As the second half of the poem “on our first date he says
he’s poz & asks if i’m scared, if i still wanna” reads:
a wormhole opens
& then men who made
me
mash—this beasty skin
we species in, stabled
& shorn, blinkered
to moral in ymage’s mold
the past—all plastered
cast
cracked, & thru the
slit comes
a fist of flowers,
flaming sworde
deformed transformed—all muscle
sprung to labor love, the
rough
factory of flesh invents
itself
a representamen—fetish’d
& hung scum suckers
dumb scruff’d
my rude forensics, pluck
up
in the frightened zones
of my theater—meat-slung
selves carried off
in shards—all false heads
of beauty’s cooing orphic
anesthetized
a langue lost i
this is a song
& this is too—
