Barfly

by Michael Lista

We’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital.  Splicing Byronic rhymes and Auden’s meters with twenty-first century irreverence and the profane juxtaposition of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly , Michael Lista’s third collection, are alternately aggressive, humane, LOL funny, and raw with break-your-heart vulnerability.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published June 4, 2024

Reviews

[Patrick Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Irreverent, funny, formally inventive. Bukowski meets Michael Robbins.

[Tatyana Frison · Rating 1 out of 5]

“Bruh”

[Andrew Sare · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Sports

The Olympics is just power eating ,
You know, where one kid competes to see if he can eat more hot dogs than everyone else,

For kids too rich or thin or shy or vain
To admit that they’re in pain.” Lista

Barfly: wherein Lista wallows in pain, drugs, numerous lost loves, despair for the world and literature, and his own failure, all in the name of putting this collection of ditties on paper. He advises the aspiring writer to lose their voice, not find it, so that they are similarly forced to wrestle out good work.

In his post script he thanks the usual suspects and says how enjoyable it was for him to write this. Didn’t sound like it to me!

[Forsov Habit · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vacuous. Uninteresting, both in terms of the ideas and the expression of them. Exactly the opposite of good poetry. There are better ways to spend your time, or even waste it.