Sky Lounge By Mark Bibbins
Sky Lounge by Mark Bibbins, graduate, MFA in Creative Writing at The New School; faculty, Creative Writing
Graywolf Press, 2003
Graywolfpress.org: I was reading about a drug that induces
immortality-but it causes a terrible rash…
As a wise man said of suicide by fire,
That would be something.
—from “Anodyne Slide”In this restless and urbane debut collection, Mark Bibbins offers a virtuosic poetry. Its subjects are modern and flawed, corrupted by their own damaged glamour: a gorgeous rock star drowns, a C-list actor earns unspoken derision, a whore’s snow angel stands up and thrashes her mother dead, “flattery” becomes an etymological “licking.” These poems constantly question decency, the ordinary and unwitting acceptance of the status quo, and they dare to meet the reader, like the beloved, “at the fringes of respectability.” With language and structures both formal and invented, Sky Lounge introduces an unpredictable imagination at the work of making irreverence, sex, and elegy into a provocative new music.