Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Barry Dish's Avocado Love

This kitchen sink book of poems does the cliche-slight proud as it is about a kitchen sink. The first-person aluminum cupola alternately sings and moans in Barry Dish's Avocado Love, and the results are striking: "I accept the sludgy waste of your bowels, O tomato paste!" and "Foul dispenser of unwanted guts, the casserole's detritus hang at my drain's uvula" are just a few lines that will rivet the reader in suspense and disbelief.

Some poems, true, skirt mawkishness when the family is away and the sink grows bored enough to elaborate on its passive pensees: "I, the receptacle, accepting anything and everything/Rust in this corner, dark and damp when the plug is stuck".

Not to everyone's taste, perhaps, but Dish's pleas are brave interrogations into our many loveless kitchen hypocrisies, the lemons often dominating the sweet basil and the cupcake.

No comments: