Superdoom: Selected Poems

by Melissa Broder

Featuring a new introduction from the author, Superdoom: Selected Poems brings together the best of Broder’s three cult out-of-print poetry collections—When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone—as well as the best of her fourth collection, Last Sext.


Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, with humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder’s language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness and raw intimacy. At turns essayistic and surreal, bouncing between the grotesque and the transcendent, Superdoom is a must-have for longtime fans and the perfect introduction to one of our most brilliant and original poets.

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2021

About the author

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels DEATH VALLEY, MILK FED and THE PISCES, the essay collection SO SAD TODAY, and five collections of poems including SUPERDOOM: Selected Poems and LAST SEXT.

Her books have been translated in over ten languages.

She lives in Los Angeles.

www.melissabroder.com

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m basically a crow. Make the light dance across your book cover with shiny, reflective foil and you have my attention. Add Melissa Broder’s name to the cover and you have my credit card swiping recklessly. Again. Nary any buyers remorse from me however because Superdoom, a selection of poems gathered across the three chapbooks that garnered Broder her early cult following as well as highlights from her 2016 full-length collection, Last Sext, is a wild, weird, and whimsically wonderful ride. ‘Yes I think I am having a human experience,’ Broder quips and I have certainly had quite the human experience through the course of reading this collection. I love books that become a companion of sorts and Superdoom has gotten quite the mileage with me this summer as I’ve been on a rotation of couches and living out of a backpack. Which, I all things considered, peak poetry for such tumultuous times and the sardonic surrealism and self-depricating laugh lines harmonized so sweetly with my heart. Broder probes the anxieties of both the exterior and interior lives we traverse. employing dark humor and evocative (and often grotesque) imagery and wordplay that light up the page like a fireworks display. What I’m floundering to say is that Superdoom blew my mind and it's so explosively good you might lose some fingers apparently. There is a darkness wild and raw to the heart of things here illuminated through rich humor and a derisive self-help approach that takes the world in its teeth and shows it to us in misshapen and metaphorical caricature boarding on a sense of surrealism that manages to transcend even the most daring of Broder’s wordsmithery. ‘Worship light and in doing so transform,’ as Broder writes in Growing Loser’, but adding ‘don’t ask me how,’ in her rather signature quirky blitheness across heavier themes of sex, death, god, and filling the many holes in our lives and Superdoom: Selected Poems makes for a punchy, unforgettable adventure of the soul.

Hope This Helps

We need a loving grown-up to give us advice
and that loving grown-up is the universe.
Who wants to go to the universe for help?
You can’t touch the universe
or kiss its mouth
or stick your fingers in its mouth
though sometimes the universe works horizontally through people
and I like that.
My friend channeled the universe
when he said I was milk.
My friend said I was born milk
but then grown-ups poured in lemon juice
which makes sense
because I’ve always felt like rotten cottage cheese
and I’ve been running around the planet
like I don’t want to be this
when in fact I am milk
and was always milk
and will always be milk.
I don’t think this is a story about blaming grown-ups
for the ways we are ruined.
I think this is a story about knowing what we are up against
mostly ourselves
and what our essential consistency is
which in my case is milk
and in your case is milk
you are milk you are
milk you are
so milk.

Raise a round to milk, friends, this poem has been living rent free in my heart all summer long blaring its television, stomping on the floors, smoking out the kitchen window, and I love it all the more for it. Now before I start lauding this collection with phrases like “cerebral sublimity” or “pants-shittingly awesome”—which, to be clear, it is—I will admit that upon starting I wasn’t sure if I vibed with it. It registers as fairly caustic at first glance, flipping through and realizing every poem was so abstract but once you find the groove it opens up to incredible degrees of greatness. This won’t be one for everyone but ‘the stars don't give a shit’ and neither does Broder (and good for her). However, upon wading into the work and allowing it to seep into my soul, I realized this was exactly what I vibed with and paired so well with my recent interests in reading about surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. The spirit of her poems feel tangential to surrealist artistic ideology, channeling a dark whimsicality of imagination with dreamlike internal logic and imagery to give voice to the abstractions of emotions, allowing the amalgamation of fantastical expressions to produce emotions and deliver insights in ways that are elusive and nearly intangible yet felt more deeply and resonating into the more metaphysical caverns of our hearts and minds. Like going within yourself and finding something new where you’ve been all along, or as Broder writes:

I went under my skin
Which was my old skin
And under the skin of my soul
Which was an old soul
Though new to me
There was so much silence
I was surprised to like it

It’s an expression of the same old world but in fresh ways that remain rather intangible, like god was showing me / the code through a prism and sticks in our mind because we can understand it but never fully decode it. I’m reminded of poet Joseph Ceravolo’s collection The Green Wake is Awake where poems such as The Book of Wildflowers deliver lines devoid of grammatical cohesion yet can still make the intended emotional resonance strongly received and felt, such as a line I’ve long loved ‘I can’t live blossoming drunk / this story of climbed up / be world to any apples! / be anxiously!.’ Similarly, I’ve been reading this alongside On Homo rodans and Other Writings, a collection of Remedios Varo’s journals of automatic writings and other surrealist writing exercises, program notes, and, most relevant here, prose-poem commentaries on her paintings which walk through a paintings imagery rather adjacent to the way Broder walks us through her imagination. Which is all to say that once I caught the hook of Broder’s poetic aim she reeled me in like a deep sea fisherman pulling a marlin from the ocean of the physical world into her magical linguistic kingdom. If you approach the title poem like a surrealist painting, the stanzas a canvas where words are pigments applied by the brushstrokes of lines, it really reveals itself to you.

Superdoom

There are 200 flavors of panic.,
The worst is seeing with no eyes.
Cowboys call it riding your feelings.
I call it SUPERDOOM.
On April 5th I was 98% alive.
I saw my blood sugar at the mall
And spilled into a hall of numb light.
The earth kept coming and coming.
Every human was a baby
Puncturing my vehicle.
I tried to stuff a TV
In the hole where prayer grows.
A salesman prescribed zen.
I said How long have you been alive?
He said Six minutes.

Admittedly during the first week or so reading this I would send samples to poet friends who’s opinions I really value questioning it it was good, if it was eye rolling, or if it was great precisely because it played with being vaguely eye rolling in the best ways. I think I fall upon the final sentiment, but I mean that in a loving and positive way. And so many of these poems have just immediately embedded themselves into my heart, such as De Forest Station which I must have read a dozen times during July and was the first poem to speak to me (and by speak I mean it grabbed me by the shoulders and loudly sang directly into my face like Björk having a panic attack):

De Forest Station

She was built with forest brain
so she would learn to say
I know nothing about forests.

It is the geniusest thing
a treehead girl can say
this I know nothing.

She tried to be a DDTberry.
She tried killsyrups.

She did not think another
treehead girl would ever come
but here they are
with matching forests.

Now there are two.
A map might be made.

Come canopy you
DDTberry killsyrup treeheads.

Let's action the kind word
tongue to tree.

Let us fertilize
root and branch.

Let us make map us
and learn to say help me.

Help me help me help me
until we go fallow
clean to our unearthliness.

Let us say help me
until the cackle crows are stilled.

Help me help me help me
help me help me help me.

It is the heroist thing
a treehead girl can say.

There really is no good way to put into language how this collection makes me feel because it already exists in its most perfect and paired down linguistic form and once it takes root in your mind it begins to grow into you in a rather transformative symbiotic relationship of reader and reading. ‘I don't know how I came up with the words "forest brain" and "treehead" for the protagonist,’ Broder admits in a short discussion on De Forest Station in Poetry Society of America, ‘They felt like the right way to describe a human being who has a mind that is constantly in motion, growing. She suffers for it. A forest is beautiful and natural, but if it's growing in your brain it can feel like weeds.’ Much like the alleviation of grief from companionship in the poem, the reader may find solace in these poems when Broder hits on existential anxieties we didn’t realize we had until she gives them words and, in doing so, shows us we are not alone and can share the map. As she say, this collection ‘explores learning to live somewhat peacefully in the body through the help of a map…but only if you share it with others.’ I find this fits nicely in the spirit of the collection, as it is a collaborative search where poems become a map pointing towards a conclusivity that remains fugitive and shrouded in mystery on the horizon. While this evasive quality may be off-putting to some, I find it is precisely this element that makes them hit so strongly and affords them a real universality. Broder speaks to this in an interview with Lit Hub:

‘One thing I really love about poetry is the room for the mystery, the room for the braid or the weave or the unknowing. Certitude seems very trendy to me nowadays…And what I love about poetry is that it’s a realm for not knowing. The experience of writing a poem can leave us with a question. It’s the Rilke thing: learn to love the questions. It was really freeing when it dawned on me that poetry doesn’t need to be understood, it needs to be experienced. There are different ways we understand things. We don’t just understand intellectually. We also understand with our heart or we can understand through desire; there are probably infinite ways of understanding things. What I love about poetry is that you’re not forced to come to an intellectual resolution.’

Perhaps this is merely the poet version of the old maxim that “it’s not the destination that matters but the journey to get there” but that doesn’t make it any less true and directs us towards the comfort of art. While Broder warns ‘you shouldn’t just fill one space / with the unclarity of another,’ its not that the poems aren’t clear its just that they are meant to embody the seeking that makes them stick.

In Want of Rescue From the Real

My mindfriends went
They offed themselves
I made new mindfriends fast and wet
But they kept dying dry
Fantasies die so dry
Still I held on
Because the real is arctic
And I am without womb
And the car of inner Earth
Will ash my bones sometimes
Then they all began to die
Before they even breathed
And I could see their corpses
Before I saw their eyes
And a thousand past-life deaths
Tore the mask off my mind
And I am scared of death
And I am scared of life


There is such a refreshing poetic sensibility to this collection that embraces the weird and makes such vibrant imagery with it that defies tangibility. ‘I lap your milk of illness up It nurtures my dying,’ she writes, finds dynamic imagery such as ‘there were bats / in my ribcage and I didn’t even know / Behind them my soul was snowing,’ or, in Dust Moan, writes ‘I am in the wrong love or on the wrong planet….Can people tell how mirage I am. It's abstract, embodying her notion that ‘you are art and you are not art,’ and the act of reading is also the act of becoming part of the art. Its provocative, it digs deep, and it often channels the grotesque. ‘The women have not stopped crying / throughout history,’ she tells us, and much of the reason is that the men have not stopped crying about what is “respectable” or “art” for women to discuss. Broder says fuck them, say some gross shit. Embrace sexuality. Embrace the weird, the wild, the raw, the uncomfortable, grab life by the throat and tear it open for a proper visceral experience. Its how we learn what's inside life, how we see what blood flows through its veins. As Broder writes:

My pussy tastes like rain to you
I will not make this a romantic poem
Poems are made of mistakes
Poems about poetry are mistakes

I look to mistakes and say am I ok?
I look to mistakes and say make me ok.

I love this notion about how we learn from mistakes and can think of art as a form of making mistakes in order to learn from them. Her statement that ‘poems about poetry are mistakes’ is more about embracing that aspect than a boycott on poems about poetry, particularly as one of my favorites in the collection (originally from Meat Heart) is about just that:

Today I Will Be a Benevolent Narrator

My little paper people
I am going to love you

Thought I do not yet love myself
I ask god for help

I say god, you old stuffed potato
These characters need a yellow kitchen

These characters need a hot dinner
Help me help them

Pull my strings
And I’ll even join them at the table

Maybe you will join us too?
Someone else

Can pull your strings
You are tired

You must be so tired
Let’s be happy peasants together.

Sure, perhaps the provocative does rely a bit on the grit and shock aspect—lines like ‘Thirsty for milk and humping / god’s knee till god feels like a doll / passed from suffering person / to suffering person’ is a great like that nobody is injecting into their soul and just like…feeling numb towards—but it is done with care and humor and never feels edgelordy or reliant on the shock approach. It’s also just characteristic of her style that also works so effectively in her novels. Broder addresses this in the book’s introduction:

​’The same psy­chos­pir­i­tu­al and mythopo­et­ic themes that inspire my prose writ­ing. We write our obses­sions, and mine seem to be — in these poems and now in prose — sex, death, con­sump­tion, god, spir­i­tu­al long­ing, earth­ly long­ing, and holes.’

Holes indeed, and ‘Humans / are always waiting for / something to stuff our / holes’ she writes in Varieties of Religious Experience. Though the focus is less the existential and sexual holes we contain or encounter but what we use to fill them. ‘Dig out my third eye,’ she writes in Moon Violence, ‘the hole I fill with sickness this time / Every time / This is what I do with love.’ We are left to wonder what we fill our own holes with–is it consumerism, religion, family, sports, art, reading, or something else? And in understanding our holes we can hopefully become more whole.

I ate
the world and I ate
the world. It tasted
like a bandage’
—from Haul

Melissa Broder’s Superdoom is a super collection of poems that encourages and rewards multiple readings. Everything she touches is gold and I can’t wait to read more from her, especially as reading this feels like a shared experience with the speaker. It may not appeal to everyone and it may take a moment to find your route in, but once you are this is a wild, enlightening ride and has made a perfect summer companion for me. Because sharing experience is what holds strongest so, in the words of Broder, together ‘Lets corpse.’
Allllllright.

5/5

Light Control

I have never been inside myself
Another place wants me dead
It is built in a ring around my core
Like asking a donut how to live
It can only cry and be eaten
Don't you see
Angels have tried to help me
And I smiled for them
Feeling genuinely good and kind
Then after a while I got tired
Of being on good behavior
They never asked for perfection
But I felt I needed to perform
And the smile stayed no matter what I did
Even when dying improperly
I left everyone I knew in the other room
But I picked them back up again
Teach me to die teach me to die
I want to create a beautiful dying
The end will need to be dark and soft
Like walking home to your real mother

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I hear dogs inside of me / some are good and some are wrong / I keep feeding the wrong dogs"

[Steph · Rating 2 out of 5]

happy to have read this and fully affirmed that broder's poetry is not for me. her prose is magnificently and precisely up my alley, but my little brain just can't handle the level of abstraction in her poetry.

i did really enjoy the introduction where she talks about a sort of amnesia she has about the origin of these poems. she says that "a poem can be a vessel for living in the questions themselves, a sphere of ambiguity, a celebration of negative capability, a field for beginner's mind, a braid of darkness and light, a little fortress of sacred pause." somehow that resonates more than any of the actual poetry does.

favorite, from "consecration":

i hear dogs inside of me
some are good and some are wrong
i keep feeding the wrong dogs

[h z t · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in one morning. Devoured, filled my holes with it, as Broder would say. Took off one star because sometimes all the cock-and-pussy imagery just isn't for me. I like the stuff Broder has to say about being. About existing. For her it is very material, so the sex stuff makes sense. She is milk. I get that, but I think I am lemon juice:

"The human said I was born milk
but then grownups poured in lemon juice
which makes sense because I’ve always felt like rotten cottage cheese
and I’ve been running around the planet
like I don’t want to be this
when in fact I am milk
and was always milk
and will always be milk."

This makes sense to Broder and it makes sense to me and I love her work for that. She is trying to figure out how to exist and doing so through her writing.


Some other highlights:


"She was built with forest brain
so she would learn to say
I know nothing about forests.

It is the geniusest thing
a treehead girl can say
this I know nothing."



"And when my childhood feeling surfaces
I kiss the shadow of my boyself
And eat sand."



"My heart is pegasus colors."

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t know what this is but it’s not poetry.

[Elina · Rating 4 out of 5]

2024 reread: this book has one of my favourite introductions I’ve ever read. I still find her obsessions so intriguing and some lines are so phenomenal to me.

“I wish for you only the very best kind of vanishing.”

2023:
“When ruin comes I'll hug me briefly
Then I'll dance around an astral fire in my skull
Then my bones will turn to silence I can't wait”
from space orphan :’)

As Melissa Broder herself says “we write our obsessions” and I love her obsessions.

Here’s to the void :))

[Jordan | jord_reads_books · Rating 3 out of 5]

Melissa Broder never fails to make me feel achingly uncomfortable and oddly sexy at the same time? The poems in Superdoom, her latest release, actually aren’t new at all but come before her precious works (So Sad Today, The Pisces, Milk Fed). It was interesting to see her writing at its beginning and note how she has grown stronger as a writer over time, evolving into her own signature style and voice. One that is weird and semi trance like. Thank you, @tin_house, for sending me a copy of Superdoom! ✨

[Crystal]

Meatheart is the chapbook I've not read though I do think it's somewhere on my bookshelves. Otherwise, I mostly skimmed this.

Still love this excerpt from "Waterfall": "The most romantic thing a human being can say / to another human being is Let me help you vomit." Vaguely reminds me of that poem from another poet with the line about how holding a friend's hair back as they vomit being a way of showing care/love.

[Lauren G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Light bulbs
had blue veins inside
that is how alive
everything was.
Still I wanted a man
to give me my name.
God was showing me
the code through a prism.
I fractured the glass
on purpose because
I did not want to know.”

[etherealacademia · Rating 1 out of 5]

melissa should stick to fiction

[brooke · Rating 2 out of 5]

lots of recurring themes as seen in Milk Fed: disordered eating, religion, mothers/parental relationships, sex, food. lots of vomit. overall these didn't really do anything for me but i do appreciate the grotesque and vivid imagery

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

it was so bad, i want to give it a zero, but that's not possible, so i give it a one

[Joan x · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poemas que rompen con lo paradigmático del género, con sus metáforas referentes a la cultura americana, la comida, mitología griega, vacio existencial, el antídoto de la muerte, el sexo y su brevedad y hoyos, hoyos y hoyos que nunca se erradican, no hay poder terrenal o celestial que los pueda llenar, estamos huecos desde el inicio, por ende se recurre a la sátira y la sorna hacia la impunidad del ser.

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible collection that shows Broder’s evolution as a writer, including some themes that later appear in her prose. God, womanhood, food, death, mental health, sex… it’s all here.

[ra · Rating 5 out of 5]

im extremely biased i just love melissa broder and the concept of a godhole sorry !

— "I controlled my words, my deeds, and nothing more. / God wanted no revenge on my body."

[Lauren Castle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Freudian, existential, neurotic, bizarre, terrifying and so on

[Mallory Drazin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe too many bones and holes?

[Abby Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

And I have been sacred since the day I was born!!!

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

:(

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

SUPERDOOM is a collection of poems drawn from Melissa Broder’s previous poetry collections. This was my first foray into her poetry, but having read her novel The Pisces a couple years ago, I found her tone and sensibility instantly recognizable.

Thematically, there is a lot going on that reminded me of the fixations of The Pisces, and this collection succeeded in creating similar sensations of queasiness and debasement that I can’t say I particularly wanted to linger over… but I definitely admire Broder’s effectiveness in conjuring such visceral feelings, especially as they relate to sex, intimacy, and embodiment. And, it should not be left out, she is at times very funny.

There were plenty of good and interesting poems in the collection, but on the whole I found it a little repetitive in tone and style. The frequent “verbing” and “adjectiving” of nouns, coining of new words, etc., while not a practice I object to at all, was perhaps a little overused and contributed to the feeling of homogeneity. Or in another light, a very consistent poetic style.

Thank you to Tin House for the ARC.

[Shelby · Rating 1 out of 5]

the introduction boasts a very unpolished approach to poetry without consideration of an audience; basically, poetry broder wrote before she was popular, which results in a certain rawness. this sounds like it would be a good thing, but in this case, i think it might be why i hated this collection, yet like lots of her other work. she also says that poetry doesn’t have to mean something, which is true in some ways, but here…i honestly think lots of these poems are kinda nonsense LMAO. i’m not saying that poetry can’t take liberties and play with form, and i think it can sometimes be more about the feeling you get while reading rather than the actual words…but it seems like this collection is just a lot of words thrown together with a few good lines here and there? i can appreciate the vulgarity and general just unhinged nature, which i think is what sets melissa broder apart from others, and is part of why i’ve enjoyed her other works. i like the themes she regularly explores of female sexuality, existential dread, religion, etc. they’re just explored very poorly here, in my opinion.

[Gracie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Superdoom, by Melissa Broder, is a collection of her older poetry collections compiled together. It’s obvious that this is an early work of Broder’s. There’s no type of poem in here except free-verse, and little use of other poetic devices. Many of the images repeat through poems, but not in a clever way, but rambling where there didn’t need to be so many poems within this volume; I feel it takes away from the overall quality of the collection.

However, there were snapshots of genius in this collection. I wish they would outweigh the poems that seem to exist solely to utilize vulgarity for shock factor rather than to contemplate the subjects at hand. I don’t mind the use of the vulgarity when it serves a purpose, but it feels overused and pointless many times. I think Broder shines brightest when she writes prose, for I was sadly disappointed by her poetry, with the exception of a handful of gems.

[Meaghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was alright. I appreciate the introduction from the author saying that looking back she doesn't understand her poetry either.
There were some good ones, but overall it wasn't my jam.
.
My favorites from the collection:
-"Your Mother is Dying and I Want Details"
-"Under the DM Tonight"
-"Tradition"
-"Superdoom"
-"Raise Your Hand If You're Sure"
-"Drive-In"
-"Today I Will Be a Benevolent Narrator"
-"Astral Locket"
-"Satisfy the Desolate"
-"Hi Humanity"
-"The Nature of Our Concerns"
-"Exact Composition Is a Secret"
-"Visible World"
-"Hope This Helps"
-"I Give a Convincing Sermon"
-"Glowing Loser"
-"In Want of Rescue from the Real"
-"Are We Fear"
-"I'm Coming"

[Gabriel Noel · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC given by NetGalley for Honest Review

"Superdoom" was an incredibly enjoyable read. It drips with metaphor; it's the type of poetry that begs to be ingested slowly. It has religious (Catholic/Christian) undertones, but I find that it does not alienate readers who are not of those belief systems. Broder is not afraid to shy away from sensuality and how it mixes into the religious ideals she keeps.

My top 3 poems are:
"Your Mother Is Dying And I Want Details"
"Bones"
and
"Today I Will Be A Benevolent Narrator"

[Mariah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy most poetry books if only for their very nature of seeing how the author puts their ideas into writing and the form of poetry that they create. However, as with all books, everyone connects with them differently and sometimes they just don't connect the same way as one hoped they would. That happened with this book. It was an intriguing book, but ultimately I just did not connect with it and enjoy the book the way that I wanted too.
It was a decent book, but unfortunately not one that I would reread.

[Ana Hein · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I really enjoyed the poems from the older collections in this book. Ive read Last Sext before a few years ago ans was hoping i would like it more now that im a little older. No dice. I think the poems from Last Sext are the by far the weakest in the collection and unfortunelty make up the largest part of the book. But the earlier poems play on sound and surprising word choice really well.

[madeline blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

the vulgarity for vulgarity's sake, all the food, the bodily imagery, the misaligned catholic (?) overtones were all fairly distracting and at times the imagery all felt a little nonsensical, but still somehow by the end i felt myself appreciating bits of what this was getting at. there's a lot of existential dread and obsession and self hate/self discovery and the figuring out of love that was quite captivating

[bibia · Rating 1 out of 5]

not entirely sure why i started this selection in the first place for the last time i read melissa broder’s work (milk fed, for context) i was properly horrified by its contents, but it says something the fact i finished the whole thing despite it, similarly to this! …except her prose is exponentially better than her poetry and honestly it mostly felt like words randomly selected through prize draw to be on paper next to each other hoping for the best.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, what a perfect name for a book. I never know through, if im reading poetry properly, because most of it sounds like a bunch of unrelated words and phrases put one after another. Yellow tree, bright salad, I’m sad about my mother; when the world is falling apart, I falter. There. A poem. Yet, once or twice I’m swept away by one, or better yet, I feel it immersed in me, pulsing in my veins.

[Tiffany Scandal · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love Broder’s fiction. I enjoy poetry. But for as much mention of pussy/dick, death, and food, this really just felt like a rambling slew of words forming incoherent statements. Maybe the point is to shock with provocative language? These poems lacked heart and substance.

“Blood head skull hole / milk mouth teeth rot / sun hair dick suck” - excerpt from Cadaver Lamb