Thaumatrope

by Brent Hendricks

Poetry. At once a debut collection of poetry and a gripping literary game, THAUMATROPE fascinates like a supermarket tabloid and like a dazzling gem. These fifty-two poems are laid out as a shuffled deck of cards, with each suit and number tracing a different mood, tone, lyric problem and narrative or characterological thread. Thumbing through the random order, the reader must build her own conceptual house of cards, plotting connections and alliances between the Jokers, junkies and other mundane and mystical protagonists who haunt the royal parks and seedy bars, lofty towers and run-down clinics of this dense and various book. With illustrations by collageuse Lisa Hargon-Smith.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Brent Hendricks is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Harvard Law School, and the MFA program at the University of Arizona. He is the author of a book of poems, Thaumatrope, and has been published in such places as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, and Bomb magazine. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Reviews

[Paul Klinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy went to Arizona. Anybody know him? He and Wilkinson will make the Tucson Plasma Center famous. For those of you in Georgia, he lives nearby. Tuscaloosa says the little bookflap.

Exactly the kind of book I don't want to like and in some ways I don't. But the writing is undeniably good. As for a card deck structuring a book, who knows. It makes somebody happy. I thought it was interesting that this was not a Fence book. I got this thing home before realizing it was an Action book. The two don't seem that far apart. This book represents something to me. It's kind of the MFA Holy Grail: scrappy craft-based object with enough formal pep / sliding language to get over the heap of crumpled theses and into a press that publishes brightly-covered cultural documents. Rar! For those about to rock, we salute you.

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in manuscript and am delighted to see it finally in print.