Cut-up Apologetic
by Jamie Sharpe
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Pub Date 14 Apr 2015 | Archive Date 01 May 2015
Description
Cut-up Apologetic, Sharpe’s second collection, explores aging in a world where youth is terrible and something we desperately want back. These are poems about failing to leave our mark while marks are left on us — about the collective insatiability of emptying surroundings in an attempt to fill ourselves.
At the same time, Cut-up Apologetic is naïve and playful even when examining fear expressed as discrimination or the ways restlessness transitions into an inertia spelling cultural death. Sharpe finds strange new horizons “extend(ing)/only backward, into memory.”
A Note From the Publisher
Jamie Sharpe is the author of Animal Husbandry Today (ECW, 2012). He lives in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
Available Editions
EDITION | Paperback |
ISBN | 9781770412309 |
PRICE | CA$18.95 (CAD) |
Links
Average rating from 7 members
Featured Reviews
Reviewing poetry is always hard - sometimes the genre can be a little inaccessible. This collection, however, is quite readable. These poems are...maybe not cynical, but at the very least sarcastic, and I love them for it. Very solid collection.
Cut-up Apologetic by Jamie Sharpe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the sophomore collection of poetry by Jamie Sharpe, available April 01, 2015 through ECW Press. It is also available for pre-order through Amazon. I received an ARC Kindle version through NetGalley.
Sharpe's poetry is poignant and fresh, holding a magnifying glass freely to Corporate North America and to himself. The entertainment industry, banks, pharmaceutical companies, and realty industry are all called out sharply with wit. From "UberSweet (TM):"
. . . UberSweet replaces calories, promoting holes in the brains of mice at 200 times the sweetness of sugar. Taste-test panels confirm long-term nervous system damage, immunodeficiency and the inability to differentiate from sugar. . .
He doesn't avoid pointing the finger at himself either. My favorite poem that looks inward is "Talking to My Wife About Having a Baby/That Canyon's my Son:"
I feel the two of us are not enough / enough / too much
take an average and determine I don't know / will never know / know.
Why keep throwing applesauce
into the canyon?
It's hard not to read a bit of poetic self-critique in many poems. "The lesson of reality / TV is original // content's nothing, / editing's everything. // The phonebook's / a great drama // when cut right." [From "Mrs. Meg Kilbourn."] This cutting and splicing is demonstrated beautifully throughout the collection such as in "Compounded," where Sharpe takes the same passage, but divides the compound words and resets the line breaks to create two complimentary images. Then, the lines are meshed back together creating yet a third jagged image.
collapsed against the bar
collapsed against the bartender tender is the night
is the nightclub's only blonde club's only blonde broad
broadcasting looks across casting looks across counters
countersinking loss inkling loss with beer
with beer mugs everywhere mugs everywhere
As much as I enjoyed many of the poems and observations therein, the early formatting on Kindle took away from the experience. Poems ran together and the table of contents was a mess complicating easy usage. It was enough of a distraction to call into the question the integrity of the layout as it compares to the poet's wishes and that of the printed version of the collection. I was able to secure a corrected copy and it made a world of difference, bumping my original assessment by a couple stars. The first version I had seen had not been true to a single poem's lay-out. And yet, I had liked it. I highly recommend this collection, but remain wary of the Kindle format for this one. Amusingly, "Photo Booths" may sum up how I feel about the choice of medium:
"Photo Booths"
impose limitations:
fixed location
& time between shots;
same you,
in the same clothes,
with the same background.
Variations only in juggling elements:
visual anagrams.
[Check out my other reviews here.]
Cut-up Apologetic by Jamie Sharpe is his second published collection of poetry. Sharpe’s writing and art have appeared in magazines throughout Canada and the U.S., and he is editor of the Associative Press, a literary and arts journal. He recently moved to the Yukon, where he is working on an MFA through the University of British Columbia’s optional residency program.
Poetry can be difficult to review, especially very good poetry. The shorter the review, the better the collection rates in my reviews. We spend our lives in Plato's Cave Allegory. We see things and describe what we see in a fairly ordinary words. Occasionally, someone will add colorful language and it will become great prose. A few people manage to escape the cave and see more than the shadows on the wall and see the original, perfect items and describe them. These are the poets. For the rest of us, we read and try to understand something that is like an extra dimension. We might understand it but if asked to explain it back we are at a loss. It must be experienced, not explained.
Sharpe does capture some of this, but most of the work captures a contemporary setting and sometimes sarcasm. UBERSWEET(tm) looks at what we eat. In the poem "Mutable," Borges' modifying the desert may be our life's work. "Greensborough" lets the reader in on a secret in lowering the asking price of a house. Perhaps my favorite poem was "Internal Affairs." It is a lesson in the universal currency and the universal currency of impotency.
Sharpe's writing is not high art. It is a look at our society and individuals, and individuals fears and dreams and the irrational -- is the Hubble telescope watching me when I shower? "The Oscar Myer Process" is a clever and contemptuous. "Foreign Exchange" takes the reader into the bizarre. Sharpe may not have made it out of the cave, but he certainly sees things at a different angle than most. Cut-up Apologetic is a twisted look at today's world, very enjoyable and recommended.