Monster Colloquia: Poems by Robert Campbell

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“Robert Campbell’s Monster Colloquia offers readers a world full of both humor and horror. In these formally dexterous poems, the sailors’ devil Davy Jones suffers the indignities of the high school locker room. Dental hygienists are given a primer on vampirism. Zombies of the Bluegrass State ride thoroughbreds “with missing eyes and meat, one great / stampeding family of children.” There’s more at work here, however, than just deep, dark fun. What do we mean when we call someone a hero? What’s the difference between a hero and a villain? How does a person turn from one into the other? Campbell pursues the answers to such questions in blade-sharp and boldly imaginative language, suggesting that the potential for transformation from human to monster and back again lies in all of us.” -Carrie Jerrell, author of After the Revival<< We are scrimshaw: a delicate, dark webbing of veins and delusions made human by humans. In Monster Colloquia, Robert Campbell points ever toward the horizon of our vulnerability. We are “something frail/and breakable, a paper/ boat adrift on savage seas.” These poems hold our fragility up to the light and question how honest we are willing to be. No one wants to admit we are “Least likely to survive the epic in one piece.” These watertight poems also let us laugh—our heroes are dull, but our zombie selves, “Having eaten the city of Louisville,” are empathetic and resourceful, after all, “What doesn’t/ kill you makes you hunger/ for human flesh.” Campbell curates a world of juxtapositions, and through the chronicles of Davy Jones, whose fear of locker rooms comes “Not because he’s ashamed of his privates, but due to recurring dreams of/ pirates…”, shows us, we are all more than one story. Here there be monsters, here we are monsters, and still our modern anxieties: tweets, “googling testicular cancer”, “the maze of cubicles”—all abound. This collection refracts our current pre-dystopian state—where emergency declarations may shake us momentarily awake, but soon we sink back under and become “fixated once again on things/ that matter in this world: vengeance, hell, high water.” Poetry is how we will survive ourselves—in this space, “the spine/ lengthened within us as/ we drifted among satellites/ and debris, unburdened/ even by each other’s gravity.” >>-Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat