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Age of the Demon Tools
You have to slow down,
and absorb calmly, the procession of gritty, pointillist gnarls of poesy
that Mark Spitzer wittily weaves into his book. Just the title,
Age of the Demon Tools,
is so appropriate in this horrid age of inappropriate technology—you know,
corruptly programmed voting machines, drones with missiles hovering above
huts, and mind reading machines looming just a few years into the demon-tool
future. When you do slow down, and tarry within Spitzer's neologism-packed
litanies, you will find the footprints of bards such as Allen Ginsberg,
whose tradition of embedding current events into the flow of poesy is one of
the great beacons of the new century. This book is worth reading if only for
the poem "Unholy Millenial Litany" and its blastsome truths.
—Ed Sanders, literary icon
Only dumbf**ks will not
read this book and exult. Spitzer's furious epic is a supremely satisfying
blasphemous gorgeous cantankerous yowl for a generation of hep-infected-cats
neutered by American supremidiocy. He has managed—quite un-nicely, thank
you!—to tweeze every bloody splinter from our polluted and polluting
culture. His Missouri misery odyssey ra[n]ges from big bass to big brass,
from celebrity bodies to celestial bodies, from a micro-war between the
blustering hero-narrator and local developers bent on greed and eco-genocide
to a macro-war between the US government and practically everybody else,
including its own soldiers. Most rewarding is Spitzer's renovated language
that, read and screamed aloud, bends and twists and curls the tongue so
erotically that orgasm is a valid conclusion. Really.
— Debra Di Blasi, author of
The Jiri Chronicles &
Other Fictions
Triage of daily life and
text, mines in the headlines, flat faced mutancy in the details of man's
folly and avarice, rapacity and ballsack confusion, set against an
individual pastorale amid the cowpies, text addled by brush, "angry vines,"
and "channel cats with mongo backs," sluiced with wind and wave, in turn set
against the maw of what increasingly seems to no longer exist, green world
of birdsong, face of simple intention, word strong as bough, and so forth
(and yet . . .). Text with an edge like a serial killer's holiday in a
target rich environment, the monkeyward of Washington, or the plains of Iraq
and Afghanistan, corporate board rooms and city council meetings clotted
with preening inanities in the form of the human, etc., the text's language
slick as a lineman's clit, doffing a nod to the warbled wordexitry of
Burgess and the wee ones who sleep in eaves, all woven with the witchery of
electronic missives, condensing words to mush. Spitzer in battle-rut (Moloch
panting beneath.) —Skip Fox, author of
At That
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