Citizen Of

by Christian Hawkey

“ The Book of Funnels is one of the strangest and most beautiful first books of poetry I have read in a long time.”—John Ashbery Christian Hawkey constructs a visionary world rich with fantastic imagery. In blurring the line of reality versus imagination, this turbulent dreamscape calls into question the frightening and surprising nature of the actual world. Christian Hawkey ’s The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004) received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hawkey is co-founder of the international poetry journal jubilat, and he teaches at Pratt Institute.

Genres: Poetry

129 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Paul Toth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't explain, I think it's love.*



*What's with the cover? It's almost as bad as my ex-publisher's hatchet job on my novel Fizz.

[martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this because I loved his poem in The Best American Poetry 2006; sadly I think that's still my favorite poem, but I did like a lot of the others. This took me three months to get through, though. At his best, Hawkey is wonderfully weird, with poems full of animals and skies and a sense of disconnect. At his worst, he gets bogged down in the same, and some of the poems were a little too opaque for anything to grab me.

This is the poem that turned me onto him:

Hour
Christian Hawkey

My sixth sensurround
is down, my second skin
the skin I'm stepping
into: I lick
a new finger & hold it up
to the wind: O my beloved
what. O
my beloved what. O my
beloved shovel-nosed mole
can I clean the soil
from your black, sightless eyes
can I massage with fine oils
your tiny, webbed feet
are you tired of running
into drainpipes
does your mouth foam
approaching power lines
are your tunnels collapsing
do you have work to do
does the dirt breathe
do you breathe the air
between the dirt
are your lungs
the size of earlobes
do you hear me
in the tunnel next to you
have you cut your nose
on a shard of glass
have you excavated
the severed, blue leg
of Spider-Man
did you pause to admire
his red booties
are you tunnels collapsing
do you have work to do
am I keeping you
am I keeping you

[Mattilda]

At first this book made me gasp -- forget it all, it’s just brilliant! “I’m standing on a love song. I can hear it tick.” What more can you ask? In some ways, this collection is expanding the spookiness of Hawkey’s first book, The Book of Funnels, so now there’s not just a critique of “civilization” but also imperialism in all its paranoia. But the poems get repetitive -- I like seeing pigeons as machines, the circular way that thoughts produce nonsense, hours of doom, echoes of movies into holes as eyes -- but the book doesn’t blow me away like The Book of Funnels, maybe because now I’ve read that first book, which I knew nothing about beforehand, and so I have expectations -- damn expectations!

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is definitely an excitement in the poems here. It's like each one just yells out "Hooray!" But then they're all yelling "Hooray!" over and over, and I don't understand why the poems don't take advantage of the imaginative space they've created to actually say something more.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

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