The Technicolor Sycamore 10,000 Afternoon Family Earth Band Revue

Author: Ryan Skrabalak

Publisher: Ursus Americanus Press (2024)

To attempt to write about Skrabalak’s poetry is to be already doing the wrong thing. So instead here are a few completely hypothetical poetic movements that his work might speak to: The Floozy Parataxists, The Gnostic Hobgoblin Popular Front, The Lachrymal Leninist Ketamine Experiment, Carnival Barkers for Public Sex Depots. Any of these movements might house the same concerns as Skrabalak’s The Technicolor Sycamore 10,000 Afternoon Family Earth Band Revue which interrogates the syntagmatic structures of language as the manufacture of a larger cultural hegemony. If order encloses us, then disorder delimits our ability to be adequately expressed and thus legible. I mean, just look:

"bent I, my contrition over bathroom sink
solicited greased up darkroom milkshake
now do I poems in quick silence of mind
moon river wider than a mile I, lovesick

or otherwise codependent boy who will
solo scene in this, the national economy"

Skrabalak’s subject is both delivering and receiving action but never becomes object. His poiesis never gets stuck in the fussy clutter of conjunction or preposition (as so many poets do), as if through some clean elision, and continues like an arrow shot through a particle accelerator. These poems will likely shift some subatomic part of you, probably, to the left.