The Hotel Sterno

by Jeffrey Little. 58 pages. Spout Press, PO Box 581067, Minneapolis, MN 55458-1067.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

You might know his name from Driver’s Side Airbag or Lost & Found Times. Maybe not. But here in The Hotel Sterno is a great collection of poems. A one pome book, a serial poem with many individual poem parts (with each gotten its own title). A form of intrepid intermedia poem in the sense that its parts are poems (with titles) as individual works but they hang together as one poem, in one song of longing soul. It’s great to see this form exercised so well. Go Little. Reminds me as I read of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. This is a jazz inspired all things present onslaught of sound imagination. Invigorating, exciting. Capturing the essence of a music poem spewn spewed from the darkness, the sad side of the heart, the weary side of the soul. From this point, this place, this secret location of the imagination one hears these words as notes floating about above making a Tom Terrific foggy sheer veil of poetry dancing. Man, this poet’s mind burst with words! One wonders… in most of our minds there is one word and then another word ’ might be fast ’ but reading this, hearing this ’ one knows that in Little’s imagination there are two words at once, three words maybe, maybe more all at once. All words at once. Wow.