Continental Breakfast

by Danny Caine

“Danny Caine’s Continental Breakfast portrays suburban life in the Midwest with humor, pathos, and tender care. Populating chain restaurants, deserted shopping malls, and family Passover dinners, the characters of the poems narrate an experience that, while familiar to many, doesn’t often make it into the pages of poetry collections. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll raise your can of Bud Lite.”

-- Megan Kaminski, Author of Deep City

Continental Breakfast, an often-humorous book, explores the effect of mass commercialism on identity, love, religion, and the American landscape. From Kanye West at Waffle House to dead malls to Passover candy, the book questions how branding and celebrity function as filters through which we see the world.

Publication Date: March 17. 2019

Genres: Poetry

129 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2019

Reviews

[Tonee Mae Moll · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart, funny and irreverent, but not without tenderness. Pop culture poems for the Midwestern heart.

[Charlie Eskew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished this and enjoyed the humor and beautiful imagery set against some harsher, more immediate issues of consumerism and gun violence. Danny makes a great decision in not explaining the culturally specefic moments either allowing the reader to experience the poems as an other but never with a feeling of exclusion.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

I struggle mightily with poetry, try as I do. This book, however, was no struggle. I devoured it. Danny Caine writes with humor and depth. He does that thing it's tricky for me to explain, writing things that strike chords of knowing deep in neural paths I forgot I had and celebrating things we might not want to admit we love. He writes about the midwestern cultural wasteland that is my heritage, but from Kansas instead of Cleveland. Truly poetry that can hook a poetry novice like myself. Highly recommended.

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t get to Lawrence, Kansas, often. It’s about an hour trek from Kansas City, but when I do go there I always stop in Raven Bookstore because of its excellent selection of poetry and its support for area poets. Now I know why it’s so good to poets. The friend we’d lunched with handed me Continental Breakfast and said, “This is by the owner of the bookstore.” I flipped to the first poem, read the first three lines:

“Jaycie

Darn girl the way you punch
those produce codes makes me want
to want to save myself for marriage.”

I laughed out loud and felt compelled to read those lines aloud. Then I read three more:

“Jaycie, check me out. Let me be
your bag boy, your paper plastic
knight. I wanna meet your mom,…”

Same thing. Laughed and read it aloud. “That’s it!” I said. I’m taking this book home, having minutes before said I would NOT add to my huge stack of books waiting to be read.

Obviously, there’s a lot of humor and sarcasm in Caine’s poems. I suspect he’d be a pretty good stand-up comic, and his poems are an interesting mix of poking fun at Midwest culture and at his Jewish family. But make no mistake: these are not light poems. “Gun Math” gave me chills and tears. It begins

“add brother add brother add house
subtract mother years ago add father
still at work add his gun add accident

add announcement during homeroom
add hole in the seating chart add
counselor in the lunchroom add
counselor in the teacher lunchroom…”

The final entry in the Index looks like one more poem, but it’s actual a previously published chapbook: “Uncle Harold’s Maxwell House Haggadah.” It’s an amusing account of Passover Seders with Caine’s family back in Cleveland. Here’s my favorite excerpt from “We Raise the Third Glass and Say”

“…And this cup is for Danny [the author],
who married a gentile and moved
to Kansas to write poems about us even though he won’t let
us read them. Even though you can’t get a health-insurance
pension-plan job with an MFA. We open our front door to
greet him and invite him to join our Seder. We pray that he
will return to us, even though he probably won’t….”

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I laughed out loud a couple of times reading Danny Caine's poems about Applebee's and as the title suggests, continental breakfast. The sense that I get from Caine's collection is both the fondness and critique of modern retail culture. Corporate apartments with rents astronomic rents. Starbucks. Hashtags. Waffles in the shape of Texas in Texas or in Ohio, the shape of waffles. Caine has an eye for spotting the ridiculous and often mediocre things we live with but might not notice. At the same time, there's a fondness for these things, associated with the feelings of growing up and having no where else to go at night but Waffle House. Some poems turn sentimental or bring a serious tone to them -- addressing shootings and culture and capitalism. Check this one out if you want some funny, accessible and hard-hitting poems.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really did not expect to give this clever, snarky, unusual work of poetry 5 stars. But, when I find myself chuckling about a line in one of the poems several days later - it just has to have 5 stars.
From Cracker Barrel to Matzoh balls, from Bono to Wookiees, from Applebee’s to the “ Bar” in Bar Mitzvah ( think beer and Jameson, perhaps not together) this poetic nugget is a fun read, mostly fun - a few sobering words as well. It is a snarky, irreverent commentary that may give a sledgehammer jolt on occasion.
Thanks to Kate and Polli for having the poet on their podcast.
AND mostly thanks to Danny, the poet, for living in Lawrence, Ks so I would read his poetry.

[Julia Gaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times fun and hilarious, at times sincere and searching, with sadness and critical social commentary added in for good measure. If you have the opportunity to hear Danny read his poems, I highly recommend you do so. Excellent collection - looking forward to the next one.

[MorgyyReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection had a phenomenal balance between humor and seriousness within it. I found myself more attached to the poems that contained a more serious subject matter and social commentary, but the ones written with satire and a humorous voice were very enjoyable as well. The poems where he touched on topics such as gun control and violence, education, and being a Jewish man in his family, as well as in the world we live in were the ones I found myself connecting with the most. All in all, this was a very well-rounded collection that I highly recommend.

[M.K. Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continental Breakfast is a collection of narratives - hilarious and wild - but told in a poetic form. I mean, I don’t know. I’m no poet. But what I do know is that I loved these things. I loved how I didn’t feel like I had to know a lot of poetry to read and enjoy them. Loved that they unearthed feelings in me rather than me unearthing some abstract thing I’m supposed to call a feeling in them. Maybe that sounds crass, but I what I mean is that Caine’s work cares just as much about the reader’s experience and emotions as he does his own.

[Alyse Bensel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a highly accessible, funny, and narrative-driven poetry collection. You like a story where the Budweiser #upforanything campaign goes too many steps too far? You get that but with the attention of line break, stanza, and image. There are also poems that comment on the tragedies of suburban sprawl, big box stores, and gun violence. This is a wide-ranging collection with a lot to choose from, especially for those newer to contemporary poetry.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continental Breakfast is the exuberant, sold-to-you individualism that paints the suburban American landscape. It's where the sadness and comical attempts at the American dream converge.

"And God said let the parents watch HGTV to learn words like open concept subway tile backsplash kitchen island two car attached garage, and it was night and it was morning, the second day."

[Thegirlintheafternoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection that speaks with humor and empathy to what one poem calls the "stripmall heart" of a certain kind of early millennial suburban experience. 4/5 stars.

[Chuck Warner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witty, insightful, moving, irreverent, and playful. For a Kansas goy, I had to look up a bunch of Jewish terms, but the reward was worth it. Chuck Warner, fellow debut author

[Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read plenty of poetry books by people I know, this is one I didn't have to slog through. It was relatable and readable.

[Grant Holmes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly solid debut, like a PG-13 version of Troy Weaver’s “Witchita Stories.” Highly recommend

[Kathy KS · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my cup of tea.

I'm not Jewish, so I was somewhat surprised at the irreverent poems about various Jewish customs and holidays. I found them entertaining, just surprising (although I'm certainly not above being irreverent about my own religion...) I'm sure I would have gotten the humor even more if I knew more about the subject.

Not all poems in the book are like this, by the way.