Sunflower Wars

by t. l. kryss. 24 pages. Bottle of Smoke Press, 503 Tuliptree Square, Leesburg, VA. 20176. www.bospress.com

Book Review by Michael Basinski

t. l. kryss. I hear this name in magazines of Cleveland & California 1960s and mimeo poetics of that era, mimeo that only alternative poetry movement to not be absorbed by the ameba of university classroom like Beat and Black Mountain, that only movement to remain noble in its working class and underclass ethnical principles of a poetry free from the political capital of poetry games. Here a clear poetry kryss writes us 30 plus years from those 1960s rumblings. The book opens with the poem (Sunflower Wars) circling about Van Gogh’s paintings. Van Gogh ’ the Mt. Everest of people popular artist and then into a poem: Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame ’ obvious tribute to the great one: Bukowski. So then there is Van Gosh and there is Bukowski and in Ohio, which must be half way between France and San Pedro sits at writing table one t. l. kryss. Kryss ’ he has a sense of the tool of line in the poem. Kryss ’ his poems record the poetically eventful instance of the dispossessed people so that they cannot be unseen by rich oinkers of oil presidents. Kryss ’ he knits words into a sweater of black-top that breathe stars and once tapped pour beer of poetry into waiting ears Cleveland and city dwellers. Insigthful. Populace. A writer or historical depth and importance to poetry UNcompromised. True to a program and vision. And one poem, Growing up with Bukowski, relates how he read his kids the Bukowski short story The Blanket as bedtime story! This poem, perhaps the best for my few dollars of pocket money left after even more expensive gas and groceries, the best perhaps of a million poems about and for Bukowski. This one should be in all the Buk mags and anths and the like. And the other poems, well, they need to be there also. But start on your kryss Christmas by (buy) reading this shard of ornament in our otherwise tried livings.