Chickenhead

by Richard Garcia

If there is such a thing as the fabulist prose poem, then Richard Garcia is the master of it. Still, we diminish the unpredictability of his imagination by comparing him to the usual fabulists-Cortazar, Borges, or Kafka. By now Garcia has mapped out his own strange territory. It's a land where reality is pliable and facts of the imagination reign supreme, where Sappho morphs into Dale Evans, a dog becomes a psychiatrist and analyzes its master, and a gangster named Chickenhead resembles Christ. These sketches are both comic and terrifying, dreamlike yet clearly metaphors for our so-called real world. In Chickenhead, Garcia has fun with us, which means, of course, that he is deadly serious.
- Peter Johnson

36 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm new to the work of Richard Garcia, and while I'm a fan of the prose poem form, I have to admit that Garcia's use of that form often seems to lack impact. That's not to say that there aren't good pieces in this collection; "The Case of the Disappearing Blondes" probably being the best of them, with its tricky re-working of a clichéd noir detective theme. But taken overall, most of the poems in Chickenhead come across as clever, but not particularly insightful or memorable.