A Twelve-Step Guide

by Jason Bredle

Jason Bredle's chapbook, the 2004 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest winner, is the most hilarious (and pathological) book you'll read all year. His work is bizarre, beautiful, disturbing, and inventive. Sample it in DIAGRAM issue 4.4 and see for yourself. Or just buy the book.

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Chapbook

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Colton · Rating 3 out of 5]

As best as I can tell, Bredle employs a persona of what seems to be a person dealing with addiction and attempting recovery through a 12 Step Program. Thankfully, Bredle's style is much more clear. He tends to write in lines of roughly 11 syllables (reminiscent of a sonnet) and mostly in 3-5 line stanzas. His poems tend to traverse multiple pages and be long winded. But the best part of his style (and arguable the chapbook) is the powerful employment of imagery and parallelism in both the Chapbook and the individual poems. One such example is “Fright Night” (15) where nearly every image is inverted as the poem goes on. This images turn into a conceit that carries the collection, albeit poorly. While the images are bursting with color and are very jarring, the overall message of the poems and collection gets muddled by all that is happening. It's kind of like watching a paraplegic trying to herd rabbits. Anyways, I am unable to draw a concrete theme from this collection because most of the poems are nearly incomprehensible due to the imagery. From the title, and the asides, I can say that is most likely something to do with the 12 Step Program. The asides that frame the Chapbook are very religious in theme, but the collection isn't religious at all. This makes me wonder why they're there, if not for Bredle to have something to draw through the collection as a thread to tie everything together. For me at least, it doesn't work. If I had to follow the thread of this chapbook, I would say that it's organized as a trip through a 12 Step Program, and each poem does tend to get a little less crazy as the book progresses. However the last few poems do not fit with this trend, which might signify relapse. Although, this might be me giving meaning to nothing. In all, this isn't a bad chapbook, it just suffers from overactive images and long winded poems that are extremely difficult to crack. I would recommend this chapbook, but only for the wild untamed images and conceits and not so much for the overall message of the work.

Recommended Poems: “Fleeing the Valley of Whirling Bears” (32), and “Kansas” (21)
Rating: 3 / 5 astronaut scrota (p.9)

[Matt Morris]

Read my review of this & other books at http://miscmss.blogspot.com/2016/12/q...