Can You Relax in My House

9780971318915

0971318913

An isolate, protracted surrealism attaches languidly to objects, animals, and emotion in Michael E. Craig's poems of semi-rural outlandishness. Profundity takes its rightful place in the shallow arena: "You can't step out of your tragedy, it wouldn't be a tragedy./ Neither can I./ Together we walk/ and think thoughts in a cornfield. . . ./ A thing cries out from the interior of corn." The reader is embroiled in textural exposition, encountering dark recessions of realism against the relief of interior truth: "Today you strike me as needing something./ So take my ten-thousand-pound typewriter . . . / . . . For here is an older,/ other world, taking almost forty sheep to make one sock./ A serious mist fills my eye. You/ have made me cry." Winsome, ominous vapors arise from the combustion of "dreamish, autobiographical thoughts" with their counterpart, the cosmic laughter provoked by close observation. "A man had been out walking with a very long cigar./ As he passed by me, closely, I could see it/ was actually an eight-inch-long ash/ that he had, perched beautifully between his/ fingers. And that he had passed away./ And that his eyes were gone from his head."