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Retrograde
"Puma Perl is a remarkable poet and an exciting performer. Retrograde is a true contemporary masterpiece." - John Sinclair, poet, jazz and blues historian, former manager of the MC5, radio host, and political activist With "Retrograde " , Puma Perl goes back in time in order to move forward-and what a trip this proves to be. This is a journey of life and survival among the ghosts and dreams of a past captured with full honesty and sharp humor (sometimes self-deprecating, other times pinning the tail on absurdity). Funny, smart, dirty yet tender, Puma Perl brings the descriptive eye of Lou Reed to her apocalyptic rock and roll vision of the world. Cover photo by Bill DesJardins. Author photo by Len DeLessio.
- GenresPoetry
134 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2014
13 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 28, 2015
Going to a Puma Perl reading is as essential a downtown NYC experience as pastrami at Katz's or spitting on the John Varvatos that used to be CBGBs. But, if you can't make it to NYC, this book is the next best thing. Puma is a death-defying poet with attitude and heart in equal measure. When it comes to NYC literature, file this collection somewhere between your dogeared copies of Please Kill Me and Basketball Diaries. It will get under your skin and stay there.
December 30, 2018
I wanted this book for years and I finally bought a copy. So glad I did. My favorite poems are ones I can identify with. I can crawl right inside Puma Perl’s poems, make myself comfortable.
February 18, 2015
(review originally published at http://www.themomegg.com/themomegg/Bo...)
“…burnt years / welfare cheese / dirty decades / stolen checks / lost kids / was it worth it / just to write / some fucking poems?” (121)
RETROGRADE is not a quiet, comfy collection. Initially, I had the sofa with its kitsch crocheted throw as location in which to read Perl’s work. I wasn’t three poems in before I had to decamp to the kitchen, to its harder chairs and its wipe-clean table. Perl’s poems—perhaps because of their upbringing on the Lower East Side, in its apartments and on its sidewalks—demanded a starker setting. I put on coffee—strong coffee—and opened the door once again to Perl and her poetry.
When it comes to subject (and more on that next), Perl is a people’s poet. But when it comes to form—to the poem on the page and in the ear—Perl is also a poet’s poet. By that, I mean that that the evidence of her having paid her dues to the school of craft are all over this collection. She is confident in her use of white space, not only in terms of her ability to coral images into stanzas that allow the reader to handle the often tough subject matter, but also in her command of line breaks (these lines break; they do not turn or shuffle or end). In “Forever Retrograde” (123), a poem that melds the choices offered by a store elevator with, maybe, the choices offered through a hard year’s lessons learned, Perl, in a rare decision to lean on punctuation, end-stops seventeen consecutive lines, each one a command, an invitation to alight or a statement (“Synchronize your nightmares. /……../Second Floor. / Hats. / Dwarves. / Tobacco.//This is the last poem of the year.”) and then enjambs perhaps the poem’s pivotal stanza: “Suicide is the only way / to ensure a poem at the end.” It’s masterful, this ability to deliver lines that do double duty through line break decisions.
Perl reminds me in some ways of Ginsberg. Both weave the immediate into their work as documentary evidence. Both have a desire to somehow sing to an audience of their peers. Both have motifs…talisman symbols that speak to core experience. Ginsberg returns again and again to his “clock of meat”: Perl returns to her knives, honed and handed over in tiny, sharp cuts of poems (“Do not believe / my spoken word, / read my scarred / letters, they crawl / down my arms / like predators”—31) and to the vital squalor of LES apartments (“I don’t sleep on the floor any more. I’m too old to crash on moldy blankets, bodies of strangers on either side, sounds of wet fucking, smells of beer, blood and vomit”—101). Perl’s “immediate” embraces punk, both in approach and character. In “Nancy’s Legs,” she documents one part of one day but in doing so, she documents an age, one where Sid Vicious and Nancy, Barbie and Stevie Nicks, abuse and love collide. As Perl pulls herself away from the violence of “…two-year olds in fishnets and vinyl, stabbing each other with knives and needles” (101) she enters an anaphoric space: “I can’t kill myself, I can’t walk in stilettos, I can’t kill myself….I can’t kill myself, I can’t kill myself, I can’t kill myself” (101).
Perl is the only one who can answer her question about whether her poetry is worth her life’s high price. And it is a high price since this collection’s “meat” did not come cleanly packaged in a plastic tray and sealed with Saran™ wrap. The work is bloody in places and hard to handle. However, even with all its gore and raw tissue, Perl manages, by the close of the collection, to make a kind of sense of all this chaos.
If one of the roles of young poets is to document an age, then I suggest that one of ours as older poets is to reflect upon it. In RETROGRADE, Perl does both. And perhaps it is the juxtaposition of a life both survived and considered that gives this collection its edge. It’s a sharp edge: serrated and a little dangerous.
“…burnt years / welfare cheese / dirty decades / stolen checks / lost kids / was it worth it / just to write / some fucking poems?” (121)
RETROGRADE is not a quiet, comfy collection. Initially, I had the sofa with its kitsch crocheted throw as location in which to read Perl’s work. I wasn’t three poems in before I had to decamp to the kitchen, to its harder chairs and its wipe-clean table. Perl’s poems—perhaps because of their upbringing on the Lower East Side, in its apartments and on its sidewalks—demanded a starker setting. I put on coffee—strong coffee—and opened the door once again to Perl and her poetry.
When it comes to subject (and more on that next), Perl is a people’s poet. But when it comes to form—to the poem on the page and in the ear—Perl is also a poet’s poet. By that, I mean that that the evidence of her having paid her dues to the school of craft are all over this collection. She is confident in her use of white space, not only in terms of her ability to coral images into stanzas that allow the reader to handle the often tough subject matter, but also in her command of line breaks (these lines break; they do not turn or shuffle or end). In “Forever Retrograde” (123), a poem that melds the choices offered by a store elevator with, maybe, the choices offered through a hard year’s lessons learned, Perl, in a rare decision to lean on punctuation, end-stops seventeen consecutive lines, each one a command, an invitation to alight or a statement (“Synchronize your nightmares. /……../Second Floor. / Hats. / Dwarves. / Tobacco.//This is the last poem of the year.”) and then enjambs perhaps the poem’s pivotal stanza: “Suicide is the only way / to ensure a poem at the end.” It’s masterful, this ability to deliver lines that do double duty through line break decisions.
Perl reminds me in some ways of Ginsberg. Both weave the immediate into their work as documentary evidence. Both have a desire to somehow sing to an audience of their peers. Both have motifs…talisman symbols that speak to core experience. Ginsberg returns again and again to his “clock of meat”: Perl returns to her knives, honed and handed over in tiny, sharp cuts of poems (“Do not believe / my spoken word, / read my scarred / letters, they crawl / down my arms / like predators”—31) and to the vital squalor of LES apartments (“I don’t sleep on the floor any more. I’m too old to crash on moldy blankets, bodies of strangers on either side, sounds of wet fucking, smells of beer, blood and vomit”—101). Perl’s “immediate” embraces punk, both in approach and character. In “Nancy’s Legs,” she documents one part of one day but in doing so, she documents an age, one where Sid Vicious and Nancy, Barbie and Stevie Nicks, abuse and love collide. As Perl pulls herself away from the violence of “…two-year olds in fishnets and vinyl, stabbing each other with knives and needles” (101) she enters an anaphoric space: “I can’t kill myself, I can’t walk in stilettos, I can’t kill myself….I can’t kill myself, I can’t kill myself, I can’t kill myself” (101).
Perl is the only one who can answer her question about whether her poetry is worth her life’s high price. And it is a high price since this collection’s “meat” did not come cleanly packaged in a plastic tray and sealed with Saran™ wrap. The work is bloody in places and hard to handle. However, even with all its gore and raw tissue, Perl manages, by the close of the collection, to make a kind of sense of all this chaos.
If one of the roles of young poets is to document an age, then I suggest that one of ours as older poets is to reflect upon it. In RETROGRADE, Perl does both. And perhaps it is the juxtaposition of a life both survived and considered that gives this collection its edge. It’s a sharp edge: serrated and a little dangerous.
June 26, 2020
In times of darkness and/or contagion, we need to dig deeper within ourselves—Puma Perl takes the tapestry of Downtown New York, making both musical & poetic holes in it with her words; they are sharp as a knife, simmering with Rock ‘n’ Roll sensuality and mature love. An amazing collection!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews