Shut Up, You're Fine!: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children

What happens when a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist poet turns his considerable talents to subversive subject matter? This collection of 63 nursery-rhyme style poems (almost all of which appeared in reviews such as Antioch, Poetry, and TriQuarterly) is what happens. Most of the titles are innocuous, but others give a fair taste of the overall tenor of the book, such as "Daddy, Are We Meat?" or "The Thumping of the Bed" or "My Grandmother's Breasts." These are poems populated by little boys who masturbate and torture animals, pedophile priests and uncles, drunken teenage parents, and countless other nasty people. Satiric doesn't even begin to capture the odd mixture of jauntiness and grimness that these poems contain. Consider these lines from "The Cow": When she grows too feeble to give us fresh cream, We'll slit her red throat, hang her from a beam, And pull out her insiders to throw to the dogs, Just as we do when slaughter the hogs. We've now owned six cows that I can remember, We drain them and gut them, skin and dismember, Package and label them, and suck up the freezer, We all love beefsteak--from baby to geezer. If you have a taste for the oddities of poetry, then this book is a must. It would also make a pretty fun gift for certain kinds of people (such as myself), who don't like poetry, but do have a taste for the macabre.