Big Hammer. issue 6 - 2003.

by Edited by Dave Roskos. Iniquity Press/Vendeta Books. PO Box 54 Manasquan, NJ 08736. www.iniquitypress.com

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Always a shot of good bourbon, Big Hammer this issue is its usual delight and it begins by CHRIST! I pulled the issue out of the envelope and there is this five piece rock-and-roll band: all women and all topless! Took me awhile to get into it ’ that is open the pages and read the poems, which are all about life in New Jersey and your neighborhood and mine, what is to say: about aging, alcoholism, domestic violence, drugs, getting laid off, police brutality and working nights. It is the poetry of the usual batch of insanity that holds American to together. I guess we are all nuts. The other day my wife asked me what are most people like? I said all you gotta do is look at your spam email - this spam appeals to the exact needs of Americans. Americans are broke, perverts, lonely (alone) and degenerate. To feed us there are 100 pages of works in here. Edited to a fine sharp point by Dave Roskos, who cuts a good slice of lime and lizard pie and serves it up, baked with the inside cold and raw, with big mounds of moth icecream and fish fingers. Yelp this hear is on a Big Hammer diner plate, and the poems are slivers in your tongue after reading this and the death of Christ isn’t quite as real as living on the streets of New Jersey from which this issue is from and foaming at the smiling poetic mouth (even with poets are from everywhere). Ands the picture of this wonderful guts spilled and bleeding poetry is thus then and are defined by eyes held open by used and dull toothpicks, with little bits of chicken meat, life like torches of q-tips. You get the picture? Johnny, you get it?