The Man Suit, a darkly comic debut from poet Zachary Schomburg, assembles a macabre cast of doppelgangers, talking animals and dead presidents in poems that explore concepts of identity, truth and fate. The resulting body of work walks a dynamic line―often reading like anecdotal fables or cautionary tales in the form of prose poems. Through it all, Schomburg balances irony with sincerity; wit with candor; and a playful tone with the knowledge of inevitable sorrow.
This is "poetry" only in that the texts are brief and enigmatic -- Schomburg never really wrestles with the ambiguity of the English language, or deploys it for musical or aesthetic purposes. It's all basic reporting, just the nutzoid facts, babe.
Damn near every poem begins with an absurd premise ("When I was young, my mother / was eaten by a whale" or "Canada is actually an ocean" -- like that), which he then takes to its natural conclusion, just to see what happens. Recurring themes include whales, Halloween, trees, murder, costumes, a lover identified as "M", and Republican presidents (McKinley and Lincoln are named, but his versions of them bear no relationship to the historical executives). The poems depend entirely on their surface details -- whatever's going on deep down, whatever "ambiguity" he seeks, seems deliberately accidental and maybe contrived.
But he's occasionally hilarious ("Remember when / I took you to see Kansas City? / That was Omaha"), and the 'Last President's Address' -- all twelve words of it -- is genuinely frightening. The long poem 'Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene' seems to be a love story (his "M" and her breasts appearing with some regularly) juxtaposed with horrifying details -- crows looking for souls, swallowing bullets, blood everywhere. The ugliest love poem I've ever read, both in its complete lack of music or rhythm, and in its stark randomness -- yet on second or third reading something emerges from it: an absolute confusion at how heterosexual relationships are supposed to work. He's throwing everything at her soul (his too), seeing what will stick before the crows get at it.
It's rare when a book of poetry can be described as "very entertaining", but The Man Suit certainly fits that description, as well as, at times, being a real masterpiece of surrealistic poetry. I have read this book several times over the years, and it still makes me laugh, I think the section with the white telephone and the black telephone being my favorite. Not all of the book is fun though, the section on Lincoln and the second half of the book generally, with a couple of exceptions (the Great Lakes and the Islands poems), doesn't maintain the brilliant, bizarre humor of the beginning. But this is wonderful, creative fun, and what is particularly nice is how the poems throughout the book interconnect, sometimes very subtly. A wonderful read, if you need a laugh or a change of pace.
Reread it recently, first time in a while, and the surreal humor is still fresh.
There were quite a few surprises in the Man Suit. The biggest was its form, meaning this is poetry that actually has the form of prose, and many poems are often presented as short paragraphs. There are more traditional verses, but even those "flow" like prose if you were to unwind them.
However, the added rhythm of the verses brings life into them. I found the more syncopated cadence pretty effective, like in
"Death is falling gently onto all our collars and it is spreading out on the floor and then a million things"
I mean, it's a pretty spastic poem to my ears, but "it works," it's intense, has strong images, it's short and sharp like a dagger. (I suppose it ends more traditionally than other poems in the book.) Unfortunately, the Man Suit is not always like that, and especially the longer compositions left me lukewarm. Probably the many images they evoke were just too confusing for me, or did not resonate as well.
Oh, the images... very surrealist: "At a Halloween party, a lung went as a haircut, and a haircut went as a lung." There's a lot of dark humor too, which is sometimes pretty funny, and some recurring sexual references, which came out a little awkward, I gotta say. Not to say the latent misogyny I felt here and there.
Going back to the "paragraph poems," they are often like the lines that a demented news reporter would read every midnight. I found their absurdity funny but tiring after a while. Perhaps it's a book to be read slowly. I read it kind of fast, and likely that's bad because you may get overwhelmed by it, or at least I did. Re-reading non-sequentially might be appropriate.
Zach's book seems to place itself somewhere near the difference between impersonation and impostorism. Impostory? Imposture? I think an impersonator is someone we reward for resembling another person, or if not "reward" then "are entertained by." An impostor is someone whose resemblance of another person is not to be trusted and is perhaps to be punished. So the question, given the title of the book, seems to be whether the business of social existence is an impersonation of some true self (maybe put that in quotes) or an act of imposture. And if we're impostors who's not to trust what we're doing? Who's to punish us?
There's a good poem in it (there are lots but there's also this one) called "I'm Not Carlos", Carlos being a character that pops up from time to time. He's like an impostor of the speaker of all the poems even though the speaker doesn't seem to know about it, I think because he's too busy wondering whether he himself isn't an impersonator. "Sometimes [the tree machines] call me on the telephone and whisper things," he says in this poem. "Give us the man suit, Carlos. Just give us the man suit."
Later we're told that calls asking for Carlos are the only calls the speaker gets anymore.
This guy manages to be abstract without ever being vague, and it just feels SO GOOD to read poetry that is odd and satisfying and still isn't vague. I don't think there is anything wrong with poetry being vague, but it's so cool to actually be able to create direct images of the weird things going on in these poems in my head. I love this. Can't wait to read Scary, No Scary.
This was an interesting book that defies genre and just becomes a book that has to be read to be fully appreciated. While it's supposed to be poetry, it doesn't feel like a book of poetry which widens the gate and ushers in a new type of reader who may not like poetry but does enjoy a book full of odd pieces of fiction. I devoured this in a half hour and fell in love with the weirdness of it all. If you enjoy weird fiction, this is certainly a must read.
Which isn't damning with faint praise: Scary, No Scary was an all time great. And I say that not just because I read Scary, No Scary first.
Although it is possible to see some of the same techniques used in that book of poems also used here, earlier. There's the slow, burning, introduction of different themes, and then their explosion--like a breaking mirror, shards reflecting, refracting off of one another, giving a distorted picture of the world. Sometimes startling. Sometimes silly. Sometimes frightening.
But this volume is different. In part, at least for me, the lines connecting the various themes, the almost hidden guy wires, didn't seem as taut: they were too obscure. Perhaps I just didn't put in the effort, but, if so, that was in part because the language was a little flatter, the imagery a little less precise. Its visible in the structure of the poems, many of which are really short paragraphs. (The same was true in Scary, No Scary, but there were fewer bits of prose.)
In this, the dominant theme, as the title would suggest, are the various roles we play in life, the way we adopt different costumes in different situations--and the way those roles can become us. Kind of like "Venom" in the old Spiderman comics: a parasitic costume that infects us.
I still don't have the vocabulary to adequately discuss poetry. I can see that Schomburg's surrealism is different than the only other surrealist I've really read, Philip Lamantia. Lamantia's seemed more tapped into the subconscious, more dreamy, juxtaposing imagery with very little regard for sense. Schomburg encases his surrealism in structures that seem as tough they should be understandable--stories, descriptions of common objects, places and scenes we know. But then they veer off into someplace strange, more and more, increasingly so, until by the end we are in that Lamantia dreamworld.
There is something both negative and positive about this difference. On the negative side, as I see it, the dreamworld is never wholly itself, a land of pure imagination (as Willy Wonka had it) or the Mundus Imaginalis, as Lamantia had it, borrowing from scholars of Islamic thought. On the positive side, by rooting the surrealism into the quotidian world, Schomburg allows us an easier entrance onto this somnambulistic plane. The poems are approachable in that way. Not to mention in their often juvenile sense of humor.
An imagination, as Stephen King said in his book on writing, working hard and having fun.
1. His back is full of knives. Notes are brittle around the blades.
2. He sleeps face down every night in a chalk outline of himself.
3. He has difficulties with metal detectors.
4. At birthday parties, someone might politely ask, may I borrow one of those knives to slice this chocolate cake?
5. He likes to stand with his back to walls. At restaurants, he likes the corner tables.
6. There is a detective that calls him to ask about the brittle notes. Also: a biographer, a woman who'd like to film a documentary, a curator of a museum, his mother. I can't read them, he says. They're on my back.
7. It would be a mistake for anyone to assume he wants the knives removed.
8. Most of the brittle notes are illegible. One of them, even, is written in French.
9. Every Halloween, he goes as a victim of a brutal stabbing. Once, he tried going as a whale, but it was a hassle explaining away the knives.
10. He always wears the same bloody suit.
11. When he walks, he sounds like a tree still full of dead leaves holding on.
12. It is ok for children to count on his knives, but not to climb on them.
13. He saw his own shadow in a park. He moved his body to make the knives reach other people's shadows. He did it all evening. In the shadows, his knives looked like soft outstretched arms.
14. His back is running out of space.
15. On a trip to Paris, he fell in love and ended up staying for a few years. He got a job performing on the street with the country's best mimes.
16. The knives are what hold him together. It is the notes that are slowly killing him.
17. He is difficult to hold when he cries.
18. He will be very old when he dies and the Doctor will say, he was obviously stabbed, brutally and repeatedly. I'm sorry, the Doctor will say to a person in the room, but he's not going to make it.
I wish the book could be more like the longer poem, "Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene." This is one of the few poems in the book that seems cognizant that any transformation or surreal image could have consequences, and should have consequences. My problem with The Man Suit is that most of the poems seem to hinge their success on a simple unusual statement. "Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene," on the other hand, creates this strange relationship between the anachronistic, the macabre, the romantic, and the quotidian. All of these just stand in what feels like this confined physical space. And all try to remain ambivalent, maybe obliquely interested, in the other elements of the scene. For me, this is how surrealism gains impact. It's not enough to have an imaginative thought, or a clever image. I really don't think there's anything so accomplished in that alone. Giving life to the unusual is what matters. And The Man Suit didn't quite see fit to follow through.
Schomburg writes some of the most unusual poetry that I've ever seen. Perhaps I'm not as familiar with surreal poetry as I should be, but this is an entirely different animal. An animal with radial antennas for horns and the sixteenth century buried in it's tin foil fur. On toast. Schomburg's train of thought is surprising and wild. It's like watching Reagan at a presidential address suddenly do a striptease to the tune of Beethoven's moonlight sonata, you're riveted because what you see is so different from what you expect. Like a koan, you feel your brain reordering its synapses trying to keep up and make sense of things. Instinctively, you know it isn't gibberish. That's the wild thing. It feels like it makes sense, humorous and moving sense. This is definitely a collection that does not disappoint.
The Man Suit is a superbly paced book of poems, and would be an excellent blueprint to follow for any poet assembling their own collection of work. Stark, surreal and hallucinatory in all the right ways, had this book been around in the 80s I could have saved myself a lot of brain cells.
With an eerie creepiness informing its generally benign imagery, this book suggests a Man Ray photo exhibition as curated by David Lynch. Lingering a little to long on any one page reveals a depth of oddities only hinted at upon first glance.
Generous amounts of humor are present as well, offsetting the other emotional collisions present. Highly recommended if you like your poems challenging in a thoughtful way.
I should read more poetry. Clearly there is contemporary poetry out there worth reading; it's just a matter of stumbling across the right poet, I guess.
This book is not particularly substantial (I finished it in about an hour, and it's not the sort of poetry where there are twenty layers of allusion and allegory to unlock upon re-readings) but it is not boring. Schomburg is good at weaving motifs and recurring characters in such a way that you feel, as you read, that there might be an actual narrative lurking in the book somewhere if you took the time to try to sort it all out. There probably isn't, but hey. There is a poem about people who wear log cabins over their heads.
I read this pretty slowly, with lots of rereading. It's the kind of poetry that (especially) begs that. I like it because on the first read it seems pretty nonsensical, but as you read it more and more, the images come to life more, until they become more clearly allegorical. But still, I wouldn't recommend reading this looking for 1 to 1 metaphors to real life, because the magic is in the surrealness. But this book manages to stay surreal, while still offering the reader a lot of things they can cling to, in order to orient themselves. With a lot of surreal poetry, I just get lost in the mix.
Schomburg just moved to Portland and I think it's safe to say that he's my new favorite PDX poet. His poems display the playfulness of Russell Edson and the accessibility of someone like Mike Topp. He also employs a cool trick of recurring themes or words that cause a dizzying sense of deja vu. Schomburg is also involved with Octopus Books and the Octopus poetry web site where a lot of fantastic contemporary poets can be found. I would also highly recommend this book for fans of flash fiction, as the poems are often in the form of paragraphs (ala James Tate).
Zachary Schomburg's Man Suit is a collection of prose poems but, as with so many of these little small press books, such labels are misleading inasmuch as the pieces here seem to be clear examples of flash fiction. And what hyper-imaginitively surreal and LOL funny work this is! I was completely entertained, frequently amazed even, by Schomburg's off-the-wall and extremely clever whimsical flights of fancy. It's the funnest book I've read in the past year or so and I highly recommend it to everyone. A rare (for me) 5 stars.
Goofy imagery. Fiery passion. Scary occurrences. Super-love made understandable and relatable. Enough mentions of the Sea of Japan to keep my mouth from closing. Funniest book of poetry ever read tonight and up to now in my lifetime. Oh. Morning. It's already morning. What a day!
(Also, what counts as poetry? These are full blown stories more often than not. Because they're surreal do they become 'poetry?' Because there are a few sections written in poetry-looking form the not-so-poem-form-lookin-things are poetry by association? Just wondering.)
I had to read this for my Creative Writing class a couple of weeks ago and was absolutely blown away. The moment I read the last page, I rushed to Amazon to order another book from Schomburg. For those who appreciate surrealism, it is obvious that the author is an intelligent man with a great command of the English language. I recommend this book to anyone who wishes to take the time to really think about it and appreciate its brilliance.
One of the few books of poetry that I feel I could recommend to anyone regardless if they 'like' poetry. Some parts I liked: "Here's what else I'll do for laughs: I'll shave my pets and apply fake tattoos that say Born to Raise Hell, or something like that. Or I'll apply fake tattoos to your mother while she is passed out in the street..." "There is a man around here somewhere, in the woods behind my house, who has a white telephone for a head. He has loud buzzing chainsaws for arms."
Surrealism in prose poems aren't usually my thing, but this one really surprised me. For every seemingly random detail or macabre twist, there were some affecting surprises. Having common recurring themes (including an index!) held things together, and I found things to like in over half of the poems, which is a pretty good ratio. Try "The Monster Hour" or "Underneath William McKinley" to test it out.
It's tough to review poetry, so let's keep it simple: this surreal collection of poems was very enjoyable, though they are meant to create a sense of confusion and isolation. Images flash on and on, sometimes in weird and oftentimes hilarious fashion. "Abraham Lincoln's Death Scene", a long 16 paragraph poem, really stood out for me with its quick and brutal imagery. Schomburg has a couple of other poetry collections, and this book was plenty good enough to warrant a look at the others.
A couple pieces in the last section stick out to me as self-sufficient, but for the most part the poems in this depend on each other and the book as a whole. This is far from a negative; it was refreshing to see a collection of poems so intricately connected just as it was refreshing to read a surrealist work that didn't depend on completely irrelevant fancies of description to make it surrealist.
For some reason I gave this a 4 star and no review. Was it because I couldn't handle it? This book is soft in the way someone's breast is soft, everyone's breast is soft. Not much about breasts in this book, per se, but that's alright. Not every book has to be sexy. Not every poem about a museum has to leave you holding five stars. But this book deserves it.
This one of the most creative poets I've read in awhile. This is a collection about costumes and hidden personalities all wrapped up in a blanket of surreal. Great book, great collection. I recommend this book for anyone.
Extremely surreal poetry. I compare it to watching a very violent storm that only gives you peeks at clear sky, but for the most part you must just enjoy watching the storm itself. Quick read, but likely worth going through a few times.
This is one of the best collections of short work I've ever read. It was a life changer. Recommended by a former student, I am finally purchasing my own copy, today. I can only pretend I am forgetting to return it for so long.
"The Opera Singer" was really richly creative and my personal favorite. This book is fun, strange and encouraging to writers who might not know where what they make will fit in.
So though I'd heard Zach reading from this book for quite some time, I hadn't snuggled up with my own copy yet. Remember when I took you to see Kansas City? That was Omaha.