There is a buoyancy to this book which redeems it from hostile criticism. For the reader who has no objection to writing that stands on its edge this will be a very desirable book.
Reviewed by Bob Williams

by Dean Strom
PretendGeniusPress 2004, ISBN 0-9747-2611-7, $14.95, 181 pages

PretendGeniusPress is the co-operative publishing venture of a group of writers who produce serious work but decline to be serious about it. The back cover of Nothing Will Save You, for example, has the usual blurbs but they are by Hernando Cortez (conquistador), Ferdinand Magellan (explorer), Bloog Mandrake (editor) and Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf (public relations). All of these were or are actual earthlings with the possible exception of Bloog Mandrake.

The immensity of the United States prompts perpetual restlessness and the ubiquity of motorized vehicles exists to satisfy insatiable – if often pointless – curiosity. Strom takes us on the road but it is no road that you would ever find or easily imagine for it is often less a physical road than an imagined highway through the quirkier recesses of the mind and spirit. Pate, the narrator, quasi-dedicated to a sketchily described form of salvation on the Internet, travels in an automobile that is sometimes of one make and sometimes of another. His traveling companions vary and may not always be real. Strom’s style matches all this waywardness and careens from gnomic to comically literary. He uses typographic tricks to prevent all this from dissolving.

But he adopts an everyday mode about midway through and in midpage at that. Moe, the hitchhiker that Pate has picked up, along with some of Moe’s friends, beat Pate into unconsciousness and abandon him. Having learned his lesson, Pate almost immediately picks up another hitchhiker. This is Jennie Strom and she and Pate tumble happily into bed together.

The love affair blossoms. Pate abandons his plan to travel north and goes to Honolulu to be near Jennie when she goes to school there. Pate observes the yachting community of which he writes “People are living up to the names on their boats, so many boats. People talk about boats across boats and inquire after the health of other boats.”

But Jennie does not come to Hawaii. She dumps him. Pate spends most of his days in idleness and many of his nights cruising the gay scene. He resolves to kill himself although resolve may be too strong a word. He composes an artfully meaningless suicide message and shots himself. But the gun is loaded with blanks and he recovers by virtue of the farce of this episode. The end is funny and itself farcical.

After this novella we find a section of poems interspersed with several short stories. The former are mostly in the style of ‘Jabberwocky’ and the stories are high in acid. Of the poetry we can say that Strom leaves no sound untuned.

Given the extreme alterations in style within the novella, we are not prepared to abandon Pate where Strom leaves him and expect a resumption of his story. It is a defect that the book is not clearly mapped out with a table of contents to assist the clueless reader. But this is a minor stricture. There is a buoyancy to this book which redeems it from hostile criticism. For the reader who has no objection to writing that stands on its edge this will be a very desirable book.
buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Will-Save-Dean-Strom/dp/0974726117
Review from: Compulsive Reader

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Cover designed by Stratos

His poems are free in form, receptive to rhyme and meter as the occasion serves and efficient at combining poetry and prose within the same poem. But words fascinate him and he expresses this with great variety and notable ingenuity. Unrelated words become bedfellows if they have sounds in common or if they differ in sound but somewhere have links in meaning.
Reviewed by Bob Williams

Review: Babble on to Babylon
by Blem Vide
PretendGenius Press 2004, ISBN 0-9747261-8-4, $11.95, 171 pages

This is an outsiders’ book. These poems – witty, irreverent and spiced with allusions drawn from many sources – will appeal to the patient and receptive reader. The audience for poetry is small and the special demands of Vide’s poetry will involve even fewer readers but those readers will find much in this collection to make their experience abundantly joyous. The reader should pay attention to the phrasing of the copyright notice, engagingly different. The cover, like all PretendGenius books, is very handsome and is mainly the work in this case of the author.

In one of Aldous Huxley’s novels a character becomes entranced with the phrase “Black ladders lack bladders.” Vide is similarly fascinated with this and all kinds of verbal play. His poems are free in form, receptive to rhyme and meter as the occasion serves and efficient at combining poetry and prose within the same poem. But words fascinate him and he expresses this with great variety and notable ingenuity. Unrelated words become bedfellows if they have sounds in common or if they differ in sound but somewhere have links in meaning. An example of the latter is in Vide’s ‘Serve the Creative Impulse, Idiots’ – a work in which poetry and prose live together happily – “And I want to be regarded as an Elvis Presley look-alike. On the double.”

When he does not make these unaccustomed combinations through sense or sound, he resorts felicitously to puns as in this example from ‘Rigva Raga Loop:’ “pomes never end/they just go republic.”

There are poems in which his fascination with sound sets meaning aside in favor of a personal language that cannot be construed.

“Agawon. I supter. Sun blackness.
‘On toma volute nagavini!’”
‘Ulahan the Latuganist’

There are two qualities in which Vide especially excels. He frequently addresses the reader directly and in ways that arrest the attention. He also plants within his poems sharp and witty observations that send the reader an electric jolt of pleasure and recognition.

“Not every house is
a limousine, but not every house can speak cottage.”

“This was my back porch before I stole it from the cops.”

“Vanity is nothing to
fear, unless you are intimidated by beauty.”

“if a taxpayer dreams
forest in the ocean
is there a gov’t to poison the world?”

“god never serves food
on good dinnerware
when we’re at the table”

The last quotation strongly recalls Emily Dickinson’s observation about God’s table being too high for us unless we dine on tiptoe.

‘Protecting Intellectual Property by Giving It Away Free’ also has its background, shadowy and suggested, of a writer familiar with Finnegans Wake. It has the same stubborn march and carefully plotted variety of the first thirteen pages of Joyce’s chapter six. If not done in the neighborhood of Finnegans Wake, it is an interestingly Borgesian coincidence.

This is a long book for a collection of poetry and it could have been better as a book if Vide had chosen fewer poems for some are notably better than others. But, as a documentation of a writer, with much accomplished and much still to offer, this is a selection that will acquire additional meaning and value as we have the felicitous opportunity of seeing more of his work.
To buy: http://www.amazon.ca/Babble-Babylon-Blem-Vide/dp/0974726184
From: http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=774

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Cover designed by Stratos and the Writer

His poems are free in form, receptive to rhyme and meter as the occasion serves and efficient at combining poetry and prose within the same poem. But words fascinate him and he expresses this with great variety and notable ingenuity. Unrelated words become bedfellows if they have sounds in common or if they differ in sound but somewhere have links in meaning.

Reviewed by Bob Williams

Babble on to Babylon
by Blem Vide
PretendGenius Press 2004, ISBN 0-9747261-8-4, $11.95, 171 pages

This is an outsiders’ book. These poems – witty, irreverent and spiced with allusions drawn from many sources – will appeal to the patient and receptive reader. The audience for poetry is small and the special demands of Vide’s poetry will involve even fewer readers but those readers will find much in this collection to make their experience abundantly joyous. The reader should pay attention to the phrasing of the copyright notice, engagingly different. The cover, like all PretendGenius books, is very handsome and is mainly the work in this case of the author.

In one of Aldous Huxley’s novels a character becomes entranced with the phrase “Black ladders lack bladders.” Vide is similarly fascinated with this and all kinds of verbal play. His poems are free in form, receptive to rhyme and meter as the occasion serves and efficient at combining poetry and prose within the same poem. But words fascinate him and he expresses this with great variety and notable ingenuity. Unrelated words become bedfellows if they have sounds in common or if they differ in sound but somewhere have links in meaning. An example of the latter is in Vide’s ‘Serve the Creative Impulse, Idiots’ – a work in which poetry and prose live together happily – “And I want to be regarded as an Elvis Presley look-alike. On the double.”

When he does not make these unaccustomed combinations through sense or sound, he resorts felicitously to puns as in this example from ‘Rigva Raga Loop:’ “pomes never end/they just go republic.”

There are poems in which his fascination with sound sets meaning aside in favor of a personal language that cannot be construed.

“Agawon. I supter. Sun blackness.
‘On toma volute nagavini!’”
‘Ulahan the Latuganist’

There are two qualities in which Vide especially excels. He frequently addresses the reader directly and in ways that arrest the attention. He also plants within his poems sharp and witty observations that send the reader an electric jolt of pleasure and recognition.

“Not every house is
a limousine, but not every house can speak cottage.”

“This was my back porch before I stole it from the cops.”

“Vanity is nothing to
fear, unless you are intimidated by beauty.”

“if a taxpayer dreams
forest in the ocean
is there a gov’t to poison the world?”

“god never serves food
on good dinnerware
when we’re at the table”

The last quotation strongly recalls Emily Dickinson’s observation about God’s table being too high for us unless we dine on tiptoe.

‘Protecting Intellectual Property by Giving It Away Free’ also has its background, shadowy and suggested, of a writer familiar with Finnegans Wake. It has the same stubborn march and carefully plotted variety of the first thirteen pages of Joyce’s chapter six. If not done in the neighborhood of Finnegans Wake, it is an interestingly Borgesian coincidence.

This is a long book for a collection of poetry and it could have been better as a book if Vide had chosen fewer poems for some are notably better than others. But, as a documentation of a writer, with much accomplished and much still to offer, this is a selection that will acquire additional meaning and value as we have the felicitous opportunity of seeing more of his work.

You may buy Blem Vide’s book at Amazon.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=774

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Cover designed by Stratos 

Existence precedes essence and a
Spontaneous choice might be
What I am and what I might say
No, not a full stop I may
Come back.

the past.

there beneath the may-trees on warmest of evenings reading on past and disregarded events. moss and its shiny dampness by the dark river and tree roots twisted on worn away banks. the dark soil. black stones taken as forest patches. the day’s wisdom begins to fade into scales of gray pink.

leave now.

I shall go forth alone.

I whispered.

behind
grey deadened sky.

there it lies.

island
small in profundity of ease
a basilicus bush and
a snake in its shade
demands respect and
so do I.

the horizon’s seam
in gradual split
lingering a hotty-red tongue
of barren land.

i proclaim myself as mountain.

modesty.

This was blurry, somehow inexplicable,
for those who raise their glass with emphasis
above the dinner table…Now for an idiot to enter a debuto…where angels breathe…
Time to give in to a testimony but, is this poesis…
When thundery sounds heard from afar…is it thunder or
A dispersed snake winding parade in the shiver of noon?

Tony!
Tonya!

Tony…
Tonya…

no Tony, no
yes, yes Tonya

how they travel,
like soft river fish
glittering in chaos.

deadened sky