On Starting A Thousand Devils

Just getting into the first in Combo's new line of books, K. Silem Mohammad's A Thousand Devils. First thing noticed is that the half title page (first page of most books on which the title is printed but not the author or publisher) is literally a half title: half of the "A", the "THOU" of "Thousand", and the "DE" and half of "V" of "Devil" are all that appear, along with an ant about an inch down from where the rest of the title would have been. Such play is characteristic of Mohammad's poetry, in which subjects, themes, images, whatnot appear only to disappear as suddenly as they announced themselves. And "announce themselves" is really what they do, almost as if the words, the lines have their own volition and Mohammad is pointing to them, like "check out what these words are doing." By "announce themselves" I also mean to suggest that there's a definite forcefulness to these poems. As in the way, the tone with which, they open: "You can't believe you / forded the whirlpool, // wormholed the fjord, / squeezed through the velveteen teeth // only to get bleached" (from "Write It Down, Make It Happen"), or "Give this America my Klan to massage" (from "Moving to Saturn"). [For those playing along at home, saying "Hey, 'Moving to Saturn' is near the back of the book, but you said you were just 'getting into it' "—it's true, I rarely read po' books in so-called order.]

Also odd about the front matter is that rarity in publishing, a blank recto (or right hand page). The blank page 9 would have made a great second half title to "finish" the first half title, or—if that option would seem too (relatively) conventional—at least the reappearance of the ant. Though, maybe the blank page works: a big fuck you to the dominant publishing world with its arbitrary norms. And you can probably guess what I'm going to say next: such disregard for expectations is characteristic of Mohammad's poetry. Voilà:

              I'm a stand-in, a pink shampoo:
          a flickery western dimmed in me:
          so close any mimeographs forever,
          white psalms I can't squeak through

          you want some lamb, some hashish?
          that's a fake cradle of entrances:
          the naked sprite of a flyleaf
          is vapid festoons, a mistake

          there is no and then I glide to here:
              it is or isn't sexy I guess:
          it's ripping a thin slant out of not
          ever anything really as yet
                        —from "Poem Beginning with a Passage from Pascal"