Kool Logic/La logica kool

Author: Urayoán Noel

Publisher: Bilingual Press (2005)

The poems in this bilingual collection trace the "kool logic" of culture in transit. Scuttling from free verse and limericks to décimas and terza rima, the poet is our guide in a transcultural tour through downtowns, suburbs, stockyards, shantytowns, power lunches, HMOs, open mics, and open sores. The voice is formal and formless, tuned to misery and parody. This is poetry as prism and as prison. The breeding ground for a new, polyphonic brand of flâneur. Fusing pop riffs, Beat whimsy, Nuyorican punch lines, and modernist deadpan, the poet in these pages is also the comedian, the visionary, the jíbaro, the agitator, the theorist, the lounge singer, the slacker  . . . Puerto Rican poet and performer Urayoán Noel has coined a new sort of pop artifact: a logic primer with laugh track, a tainted culture sampler, an urban ready-made of forms and voices designed to confound and delight the enlightened masses.