No Planets Strike

With the profusion of poets now working and the MFA industry producing so many of them, it has been easy for blanket dismissal of much poetry. Josh Bell's "No Planet Strikes" brought me out of my cynicism slumber. His poems are "inside-the-know" cool, rich, hilarious, and delicious. They also present rhetorical tours de force -- acrobatic and electrical. The creative problems he creates for himself demand very deep intelligence and sophistication. But he does the work, and we get all the benefit. These poems feel as fresh as the last lightning bolt, yet still send roots through so much of the best of our poetic past. Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, Berryman, Ashbery, Plath. No Planets Strike. No problem.

I remember this guy from my childhood. we sort of grew up together. I bought the book for that reason, but after reading it I have to say even if you don't share any childhood memories with Joshua Bell, you should buy this book. it's worth it.

Josh Bell's No Planets Strike is as beautiful as it is frightening. Bell takes his title from Shakespeare's Hamlet, and seems to take on the perspectives of characters like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the two spear-carriers standing at the edge of the stage--that is, this book is about "minor characters;" there are no heroes here, only the "normal," and justly so, Bell dissects, in his poetry, our own unspoken view points on unrequited love and male sexuality with humor and a deft understanding of language. Bell writes to us in "series poems," where we get to see what it was like to sleep with Artemus and Julia Roberts in the same book, and we get a whole new defenition of "muse" with overtly cruel and unapologetic Ramona. I celebrate Josh's great book, and I think that we're going to hear from him again.

I've been waiting for this collection of poems to come out for years. Josh Bell is an incredibly ambitious, hysterically funny, and deeply literary poet (and he is never pretentious). Reading his poems will make you laugh out loud. If you're a poet, reading his poems will inspire you to write, simply because he consistently shows the phenomenal things the English language can be made to do. An absolute must-read, it's sure to become a classic.