Road Kill

by RD Armstrong. 64pages. 12 Gauge Press. PO Box 6011, San Clemente, CA. 92674.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Road Kill presents the shape of mind and it is only a mature poet comfortable enough in world and imagination that has confidence in his bridge, road, to poetry, who can capture sculpt such curves of the mind art into words poem on the page. He do this here and it are magnificent. The form this poetry engages is a road trip - 3247 miles in 16 days - Long Beach California up the cost to Seattle and back. The obvious, yes, Kerouac, Ginsberg - but all of that is just a point of origin. Not derivative. I write, not derivative but vibrant, original, new poetry is this poem. Its place in time the days prior and after 9/11. And more than those many, many, now too many poems that made some form of comment upon that sad day, this work captures the actual working of the mind as an American during those strange days. As document then it, I think, the most important of works of art that postulate about that instant. That instant seems now far gone in the midst of Caesar Bush’s rich kid oil war against the mineral rich middle. A reaction, reflection. But I must return to: the shape of thinking of mind and gentle and sometimes jutting shift of thinking and thought and reflective and reality, realities pushin in always. RD Armstrong has made a form here. Seek here and find this word: original.