Museum Quality Orgasm

by Carl Miller Daniels

48 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 1996

Reviews

[Peter Jelen]

Carl Miller Daniels has done it again. Just when you think his work can’t get any better it does. Museum Quality Orgasm is his first book, and thankfully not his last. I am happy to announce that his new book Saline will be coming out shortly, which I am greatly anticipating. I believe I’ve read his work in reverse order, which in itself was interesting. In Museum Quality Orgasm the reader gets to see the conception of voice, which is impactful, poignant, and un-imitate-able. This chapbook is filled with lingering images, and uproariously funny lines. One of my favorites is from “free-associating the big bad blahs away: a valiant effort,” where the narrator speaks endlessly about the artist Mr. Bacon and the actor Kevin Bacon, “Kevin Bacon, whom you may remember from Footloose and Tremors and Apollo 13, is gorgeous and he wants a handjob real bad and I’m just the guy to give it to him...he kind of growls when i touch his dick but it is a good growl.” After reading this poem, I will never look at Kevin Bacon the same way again, I will only be able to picture “his big perfectly shaped cock flopped against his belly.” Another image I cannot erase is the one Daniels presents in his “persistent image” where he tells the reader that his college roommate informed him that “all the collegiate wresters talked constantly about collegiate wresters’ dicks, the sizes, the shapes, thicknesses, odd structural features, that sort of thing.” The narrator, writing in hindsight, wants to know if this is still the case, “do collegiate wresters still sit down to dinner and talk about the dicks of the other collegiate wresters?” One must assume they do, since one can’t imagine another sport as homoerotic as wrestling.
Carl’s most tender and touching poem in my opinion is “thoughts on as summer day” in which the narrator relates the joys of just sitting in a restaurant and enjoying the pleasure of a milkshake and good conversation with his partner Jon, and this seemingly benign act, so overlooked in everyday life, is noticed by the narrator, and he comes to the beautiful realization that this day, this moment, “was definitely one of those times in my life when i’m awfully glad that both those suicide attempts that I made failed.” Me too, Carl. Thanks for sticking it out. The world is lucky to have you, and access to your beautiful mind. Stick around as long as you can, and keep pleasing us with your wonderful words.