My Tongue, My Teeth, Your Voice

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

The improbably named Death Waits writes poems with an avant-garde
flavor: touches of surrealism spread across headlong short lines with
lots of parallelism. In “a nihilistic hamlet,” he suggests that his
own destruction laughs at him with “a dada laugh,” and many of the
poems are eccentric and obscure, with the zaniness of the Dada movement.
But Dada was finished 70 years ago, and the laughter of these poems is
stale. He sometimes writes pretentiously of art and the meaning of life.
After a while the reader longs for a sense of people outside of the
narrator’s narcissistic consciousness. One poem, “The Castration
Itch,” deserves a prize for the most ludicrous image of the year: the
narrator longs to be emasculated, and envisions “a lonely gushing
penis lying between my friendly toes.” Death Waits was born in 1971.
Perhaps time will bring him more interesting subjects and more style to
deal with them.