Mr. Either Or: All the Rage: A Novel in Verse - Softcover

Aaron Poochigian

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798985882438

Publisher: Etruscan Press, 2023

Synopsis

Mr. Either Or: All the Rage is high-thrills poetry; set in a funhouse Manhattan apocalypse; a mixture of pregnancy, sleep-training and violence. A sequel to Mr. Either Or (Etruscan Press, 2017), this verse-novel features “you” the reader as a secret agent in Manhattan in which poetic rhythms cue and accompany action-scenes. “You” and your girlfriend Li-ling Levine save the world from villains fighting for anarchy and the end of the human race.

About this title

About the Author

Aaron Poochigian earned a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Minnesota in 2006 and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University in 2016. His book of translations from Sappho, Stung With Love, was published by Penguin Classics in 2009, and a translation of Apollonius’ Jason and the Argonauts was released October 2014. For this work in translation he was awarded a 2010-2011 Grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), a book of original poetry was published in 2012, and many of the poems in it collectively won the New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Prize. Poochigian’s work has appeared in such journals as The Guardian, Poems Out Loud and POETRY.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

“A” is for AlfredWho is this massacre in embryo?The sea’s bad seed? The son of suck and spin?The bastard offspring of our present rage?Reluctant for the moment, he will growvoraciously off Cuba. Weathermenwill name him Alfred when he comes of age.Destined for greatness, he will carve a paththrough the renowned ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic’westward into our continental shelf.How perfect that a migrant child of wrathwill lash the wrathful USA itself.Coasts will be lost. Metropolises. Franticlubbers will suffer from the mal de mer.See, now, the future as if CNNwere playing it before your vision, live—a fetal revolution in the airexpanding, going category-five,going for blood, going American.The Lord of MisruleLet’s turn, now, to the happiest man on earth:the least removed that he has been since birthfrom perfect bliss, Stavros Canard admirestrees that have toppled from the boulevardand dropped on cars, storefronts and upper stories. .He giggles through a windshield at live wireswrithing and smashed glass (every poignant shard)and sodden lumps of vermin and the gloriesof mud on streets and promising young firesin high-rent towers. Such joy he feels, such joyon this the morning of his great success.Like any child, he loved to make a mess.Hyper at choir practice, he would singoff-pitch on purpose. He dismembered toyheroes while cackling in ecstasy.Still, he was just a naughty little boy,a brat, a nuisance. He was not yet “strange.”Then came his sexual awakening:one day, alone, he felt intense arousalwhile watching a tsunami on TV.Then Stavros hankered to do more than touslea playmate’s well-combed hair and disarrangethe volumes in the public library. So he began his villainous careerfomenting anarchy in gay Par-ee,had triumphs and defeats year after year,and then this morning: like a hedonistanticipating, just before a tryst,a gonzo Eden of ecstatic sex, he revels in the prospect of a welterof ruinous dystopian effectsreducing humankind to free-for-allin-fighting, feud and famine, Helter-Skelter—that is the world he itches to be in.He is the cure; he is the wrecking ball.He is the happiest that he has ever been.The Rumble in the RubbleYour buddy Orin, the unerring orator of Armageddon, has gone and gotten atop a raised, rebar-encrusted concrete shard and is shouting shaming words at the world: “Woe to all youheedless humans! You hoped to rule earth forever. Your arrogant faith soon will, surprise!, be proven foolish when the time arrives for your total extinction!” So the guy yawps to your ears only over and over for an hour or so. You try both to tug and talk him down but give up soon and gaze at the gritty billows hovering above the debris. The murk dispersing, you make out militants with Sig Sauer assault rifles moving among mounds of concrete. Whose army are they? Under whose orders? What’s their objective? To judge from gestures, the grizzle-bearded guy out front in urban fatigues urging them onward must be in command. Their movements are centered on your tactless companion who, tall atop a peak projecting like a preacher’s pulpit, is holding forth. They are hunting him. Rifle rounds could already have killed him. It seems they want him safely captured. Glad you strapped on your Glock again, you draw down, loose lead, leap for cover behind a bank of backstop bleachers. Some grunts repay you potshot for potshot. The gunplay might well have gone on a while, but their sergeant orders, “Cease and desist! A random ricochet could ruin the one we need alive a little longer!” Spurred by these words, you sprint and spring onto the slab where the soothsayer is still hollering. You hug him, hold him. The guy going, “God won’t do it, but the Weird will,” you walk together, with your arms around him, over the rubble. The Word says Christ crossed the water on foot like magic. Well, man, you make it a quarter mile across cracked concrete before your foes figure they’d better try tackling their target somehow.When they start circling you, cinching youin a ring of men, you wrap your right armaround the prophet and pop off shotswith your left. Just look at them: leaping, dancing.Hapless bastards can’t blast you back!That’s how it happens— you hugging Orin,them trying to trap you and retreating shot attill you carjack a Cabrioletand drive off downtown through doomed everything.The seer falls asleep beside you.

Edition details

• Publisher: Etruscan Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798985882438
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144