Review: A Poet of Grit and Grace (A Review of Rusty Barnes’s Apocalypse in A-Minor and Dear So-and-So)

By Hugh Blanton

 

Digging around in an author's backlists can reveal surprises—sometimes good, sometimes disappointing. After Rusty Barnes's latest release, Half Crime (Redneck Press 2024), I took a trip through his backlist, some of which I was familiar with and some of which I was not. Barnes is known for his stories of crime and violence, his terrifying depictions of carnage, his vivid and engaging prose. As it turns out I did find a couple of surprises—poetry chapbooks revealing a sensitive, insightful, and gifted poet yearning for love. Gifted, but sometimes cranky.

 

 

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(Apocalypse in A-Minor. Analog Submission Press, 2019)

The twenty-five poems in Apocalypse in A-Minor do not rely on the redolence of language to evoke emotion, they utilize incident and confession. That's not to say they aren't poetic; Barnes writes with splendid metaphor and smart simile when the poem requires it:

 

     One or two rubber dinghies satellite

     the boat and the crew's already 

 

     overboard in the slurried depths

     while the great white shark zeroes

 

     in on the dinghy because someone's

     foot is dangling overboard. I mean 

 

     what the fuck? We're over the side 

     in the tossing waves and all the Coast

 

     Guards have gone bye-bye because 

     the one-eyed captain has circled 

 

     the wreckage and deemed the ship 

     scuttled: nothing to save here, boys.

 

This is a depiction of someone hopelessly lost in the throes of madness. In another poem we get the four horsemen of the apocalypse: Fetzima, Olanzapine, Latuda, and Klonopin. I like these metaphorical moments in Barnes, there aren't enough of them. He often has an exactness of expression that could almost be mistaken for prose if it weren't for the shrewd gestures scarcely concealed beneath.

 

Barnes grew up in the rural Appalachian area of northern Pennsylvania but moved to Revere, Massachusetts during the time before the fall (and the Lazarus-like rise) of record stores: "Newbury Street/ in those days had an image problem./ the unhomed among the city's populace/ perched like birds on the concrete// fences fronting JP Licks and Tower/ Records." He pays tribute to the poets past—Jack Spicer, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Lorine Niedecker, all get mentions, or actually conjurings, as he desperately tries to wrestle out a poem of his own:

 

     I will wrestle these words into submission 

     with pastry from Casablanca and my right 

     hand tucked into the front of my pants, 

 

     Freaky styley like Al Bundy, no holds barred. 

     If the poem whips out a triangle-choke 

     I'll tap out bitch-style on its massive forearm.

 

He didn't seem too optimistic, but I think he did just fine.

 

 

 

* * *

(Dear So and So. Gutter Snob Books, 2022)

The poems in Dear So and So are written as letters (some resemble apostrophes) to an unnamed recipient. (This chapbook is dedicated to Heather, a name that makes a couple of appearances in the previous Barnes chapbook.) Barnes plays fast and loose with form here—a few poems he calls sonnets do indeed have the requisite fourteen lines (and even a couple that do not) but that's all they have in common with sonnets that play by the rules. All poems here deal with the peril and corrosion of love:

 

     I won’t justify the close of one mind 

     over the means of an unjust and backward 

     man bent on his own destruction: I can’t 

     stand a life without the flat press of your 

     body beside me 

 

William Carlos Williams said poets should speak on an equal level with the reader—a maxim Barnes has taken to heart. He shuns modernism, his poems find their own form and pack in his musings. With Barnes I find more satisfaction in the whole of his poems than in the design of his lines. The unsteadiness of his lines mime his troubled psyche and betray a man struggling to find love. His first yearnings came young (Barnes was a child of the 70's) when he developed a crush on a woman that appeared to him in daytime television. From one of those lawless sonnets "The Man Whines to the Wife: a Sonnet of the Daytime Tube":

 

     O Janice Pennington, 

     in my childhood dreams you made a green-bikini 

     vision as you gestured toward a full fridge 

     your outstretched and tender arm a subtle flow of sweet 

     salve for my horndog heart: save me Janice, please.

 

Janice Pennington was a "Barker Beauty," one of the co-hosts of The Price is Right.

 

In "Vegetable Love" he pleads with his listener: "Break down the ways I refuse/ to become a reasonably rational adult." Barnes steals a page from the Emily Dickinson playbook sometimes, not titling his poems and using the first line as a substitute. "Dear So and So: Lake Collow is where you’ll find me" is a poem of time spent in a psychiatric ward. In a later poem in the collection he gives us this: "Oh yes./ I have a diagnosis: it’s called being alive."

 

 

 

 

 

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X: @HughBlanton5