The Complete Absence of Twilight by Howie Good
MadHat Press, 2014
I remember discovering Howie Good’s poems here and there in
various online journals and enjoying them immensely, but I didn’t realize how
amazing his writing was until I read his chapbook of prose poems Strange Roads (Puddles of Sky Press, 2012).
His work felt like someone took 6 of my favourite writers (Charles Simic, Franz Wright, Novica Tadic, Stuart Ross, James Tate, and Michael e. Casteels) and
blended them onto a single page. And yet, at the same time, a Howie Good poem
is its own breed of beast and sounds like no one else.
One of the interesting things about Howie Good’s poetry is sometimes a line from one poem will appear in another. For example, the poem “Shoot to Kill” starts with the line “A 9-year-old girl wearing a black-and-white
Halloween costume was shot in the shoulder by a relative who mistook her for a
skunk.” And the poem “Artificial Hells” has a slightly modified version of the
same phrase as its penultimate line: “A 9-year-old Pennsylvania girl wearing a
black-and-white Halloween costume was shot in the shoulder by a
shotgun-wielding relative who mistook her for a skunk.” Almost the same, but
not quite, and reading them back to back has a haunting effect similar to
reading different headlines of the same tragedy. Or it’s like a broken pen in a
washing machine, leaving its ubiquitous stain on different clothes. It creates
a strange kaleidoscope effect. The imagery seems to be coming at the reader
from all angles, and we surrender to it.
His latest book is the chapbook The Complete Absence of
Twilight from MadHat Press. I haven’t read it yet, but I
will. And I know I’ll enjoy it when I do. Even without having read the book I recommend it to anyone looking for some good gasoline to throw on their inner fire.
