Sympathy from the Devil

by Kyle McCord

In Kyle McCord’s mercurial and visionary new book, Sympathy from the Devil, we see a bold refiguring of the moral imagination that, like a Dante without a Beatrice, wanders hell bereft of the traditional compass that would clarify the archetypes. Here the eye opens wide its compassion in the dark. Play transgresses and so, in opposition to the self-servitude of sublimity and rapture, sheds light on cruelties and exclusions suffered in the name of the ideal. Everywhere we look in this book, we find the generosity and precision of paradox. The pleasure of absurdity may distance heartbreak, but it likewise binds us to it, such that the poet’s lightness of touch and ranginess of sensibility becomes indistinguishable from his vision, the sense that one half of sympathy is always the embrace, the other the letting go. A stunning collection.


--Bruce Bond, Author of The Visible//

In Kyle McCord’s new book Gabriel empathizes, the Devil sympathizes, and an exhausted God watches a televangelist. Moving, imaginative and full of surprising turns, McCord’s poems are alive with both the world and the dead who “have no word for intimate, and a thousand words for blind.” I love the abundance of these poems, their humor, the music that made my ears howl and purr. When I dream about McCord’s poems dreaming of me, I ride an aging mechanical bull, werewolves take over the city, Abraham Lincoln begs to rip off my blouse, God’s love vanishes into my body like bread. I wake up hungry, afraid, laughing.


--Traci Brimhall, Author of Our Lady of the Ruins//


“What do you want from any of us, reader?” asks the first poem in Kyle McCord’s Sympathy from the Devil, bristling a bit, cocking its chin, letting us know that what follows will never be exactly what we expect. The book brims with wily intelligence and unsettling humor that challenge and surprise and thrill and move us so that in the end what we want is everything this terrific book has to give.

—Corey Marks, Author of The Radio Tree

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always been a fan of Kyle's work but he really kills it in "Sympathy," balancing the genuinely funny (not just vaguely witty) by toggling between the intimate, the surreal, and wood-paneled rumpus room-esque referentiality.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

See my review of this amazing collection in Pank Magazine!

http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/...

[L.B. Holding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, now.

To enjoy this little volume, you must love poetry that 1) doesn't rhyme or have meter 2) at times is so abstract that you might not even have a ghost of an idea as to what the poet is trying to relay, and that 3) you are fully prepared to read aloud so that you can taste the words as you hear them because many of them are remarkable. The reader gets the impression that many of these poems are inside jokes, which, let's face it, most poetry is, but you are definitely carried away to a certain time and place where the poet spent his time and did his rollercoaster of youth.

From my favorite, Useful Speculation:

Say I am trapped in an elevator for a little over eight months, or say we meet up
in the past where we are both there to assassinate a little-known German baron
but can't agree ideologically. Say we squabble. Say personal problems
are at the root of most major religious conflict of the twentieth century.
Says Luther, I don't care much for saints and exits stage right. Say God's politics
are that he flips ahead a few channels when the televangelist blinks on, droning
like the security announcements at the airport. Say even Satan covers his eyes
when rebels or governments are cutting off boys' hands
and throwing them in a bin.

... Say this night rolling your bag along the streets of Melbourne
you fall in love. Say each of the trolleys and the statues of dead prime ministers
and the language formed by the drunkard punching out the bar window
shimmers. And even this is not meaning enough for your life.
You grow so selfish here in this city of owls.


Not for everyone, but I'm enjoying poets both classical and contemporary these days, and this one was on the tippy top of one end of that spectrum.

[Syl Munoz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what most of his poems were about. But reading them out loud was therapeutic. There were certainly a couple of lines that will stay with me.