Stashu Kapinski Strikes Out

by Joseph Lisowski. Rank Stranger Press, 156 Crest Drive, Mount Olive, NC 28365

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Cover by our own cait collins. That is a form of blurb. You know you are goin for a humping ride. (She got work in recent issue 6 of the Whirligig - check it out - but that is a different story.)…

So after reading Table of Contents I page to 21 where is supposed to be the info about the author. But there is none. I thought this is fine gesture. I like it. And the poems within begin with the person of the works - Kapinski - being the I of the poems being hit by a limo. If this isn’t life I think. I think each morning each and everyone who pays his or her own electric bill is hit by a limo (driven by Bush these days - but that is a different story). Well, we have the speech of the people, the poems of the people, the cadence of people poetry, grit, hangover and the like. Ride by a bar that opens as early as possible on any and or every morning - there you has Lisowski’s poems. Urban, ethnic. Workin people. And representative of this other form of poetry that tosses egg salad at Billy Collins and Bob Pinsky. By some miracle when I flipped this book open this AM I come to the page with the poem titled ASH WEDNESDAY. Catholic, I love it - all bars are full of Catholics. Anyway - so the incident: there is Kapinski in a bar noticing everyone with ashes on the forehead (that is what Catholics do on Ash Wednesday) and Kapinski is looking around at the ashed Catholics and then see some women and thinks he will wonder over and chat. And he looks in the mirror and there on his forehead - ashes. Christ. Indeed. Of course. If we are not all marked men and women when as we are about to begin the ancient ritual of courtship and breeding? well - no other poem captures better that instant. Damn. I know now that I head to the can to shit, shave and shower? no matter what? the ashes. Ashes, ashes. All fall down.