Microreview Monday

Hit Wave
Jon Leon
Kitchen Press, 2008
$7.00

Leon’s Hit Wave is a racy tour de force, a fake memoir written in an absurd world where a poet can live the decadent life of the rich & famous. The depraved, egomaniacal narrator is better at “making real life seem like movies” than directors are at “making movies seem real.” Not “academic cool” but “world cool,” Hit Wave is a mockumentary for the chapbook set. [Elisa Gabbert]

They All Seemed Asleep
Matthew Rohrer
Octopus Books, 2008
$10.00

“Don all I did / was see some shit / happen I wish I hadn’t / and then got on a night bus / which didn’t even charge me / and let me off way up here / and now I’m drunk and walking / to a cave.” Like the narrator, a reader familiar with Rohrer’s previous work is apt to feel blindsided by this mini-epic. But it is actually sort of a mini-miracle. Conjuring the likes of Hemingway and Pynchon in forty-three pages of short-lined poetry is no small task, and Rohrer does just that with They All Seemed Asleep. [Chris Tonelli]