The Unsubscriber

It's great to see Knott back with a major publisher after his years in the desert. And The Unsubscriber is a fantastic survey of what he's been up to over the past decade or so. Some of the most audacious, outspoken, and outright funny stuff being written in the U.S. One of the few poets who can deliver a stiff political message in the context of GOOD poetry!

I enjoyed a lot of THE UNSUBSCRIBER, though some of the poems are weak. FS & G are promoting this book (well, sort of, actually they are sneaking it in under the radar) as though it were the work of an underground genbius like Bill Hicks whom they are magically bringing into light, but the truth is that many poetry readers have been familiar with Knott's work for a long, long time. Unlike the reviewer from Publishers Weekly, I thought the best part of the book was its last section, entitled "Poems After," each one inspired by a poet who has gone before -- most of them now deceased. Knott has a thick, rich, whiskey-soaked voice and his various tributes and homages or "profiles" as he calls them are generally pitched in a lower key than the original. I liked especially his poem called "On The Road" in which he takes the characters and zeitgeist of Kerouac's poetic novel and castigates them for doing too much driving and using too many fossil fuels: "faster faster never slow/ on the road to ecocide." It's not something I had ever thought of before. Knott has wonderfully thorny poems about the difficulties of growing up and growing older, and one of the best in the book is his memory poem about grade school called, "Mrs. Frye And The Pencil Sharpener" which I wish I could quote in full to you. He is endlessly quotable, and he embodies some of the lessons of transparency that the Russian poets like Mandelstam and the South American fictionists like Borges were so good at. When he is clumsy and awkward you often feel that he meant to be so, for some unspoken yet unchallengable reason, like John Wayne's acting.