Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

The back cover of Harley King's Mother, don't lock me in that closet! promises "landscapes of human insanity" and the poetry and prose within its covers do not disappoint.

King's poetry seems to focus on violence and sex, and often violence during sex or directed at a loved one:

Ours is a simple speech:
a few words,

a flair for images
that pry up the edges of our lives.

The sun is our bastard child,
kindled by force and fear.

I pound the nail deeper into the flesh.

Or:

Mistress

A teak mask,
carved

from the deep chambers
of her rabid,

stares
mockingly.

I lick the nipples of her young sister.

However, King's poetry does not confine itself to persons known to the narrator. In "Grocery Shopping", the narrator says:

A young
woman

fingers
cucumbers.

A smile
tickles the lips.

I open my trench coat.

In contrast to this subject matter, the book opens with nearly 50 pages of English haiku, including a prose discussion of how to read and understand this poetic form. Unlike the horrifying specificity of the second half of the book, these poems lack the descriptive details that would allow them to stay in the reader's mind:

kite flyers
first one appears
then another

Or:

river
of ice...
thawing

A few of the haiku do contain the specificity to make them memorable, such as:

summer sunrise--
the smell of dry pine needles
and bacon frying

but the majority of them lack the sonic texture or diction which would motivate the reader to "flesh out the meaning" as incited in the prose discussion "The Art of Reading Haiku". King's nonce form consisting of two sentences, the second of which is in first person declarative, produces much stronger poems than his adaptation of the haiku.

If you too would "pay tribute .... to the hairy-toed goddesses, the raving mad sleeping preachers" and similar characters, check out King's poetry.

That is a great title for a collection!