CJ Poetry Review
Good Garbage: Benjamin Drevlow's Trash Poems For Trash People
review by Adam Van Winkle
I don't know if the world knew it needed a book of poetry about trash, but it did, and Ben Drevlow was just the author to write it.
Amid the detritus of our daily lives of waste–crumpled flyers, a bondaged Barbie doll, mixed breed mutts (called herein "trash dogs" of course), abandoned roombas, an empty pizza box that becomes a scribble pad–Drevlow muses on the bigger things that can really trash up our lives with a brutally honest look at love, ex-love, parenthood failure, suicide, and sexual prowess (mostly the lack thereof).
I write this a bit dirty. I just changed the brake pads on my Toyota. My face is covered in dried sweat and soot. My thumb is bleeding where my knuckle scraped something harder than my knuckle when my wrench slipped off the brake caliper. My shirt still has bits of leaves and tiny pebbles stuck to it from laying in the driveway so I could put the jack in just the right spot to lift.
Drevlow's verse herein is similarly soiled. His trash poems drip with real life grit and grime. If his thoughts on love and sex and life sit somewhere between a dumpster behind a Domino's, time on the toilet, and a dog's dick, well, that's just honesty. The big things exist alongside every day waste and muck.
I've always admired Drevlow's candor in his fiction and poetry and in everything he writes. He has an ability to cut to the absolute core of existence in ways I'm not always able to face in my own writing. Like, if I write too much about love or sex or the worth-it-ness of this world, this life, it might make the reader wonder about my own inadequacies as they relate to such topics when I want them to focus on my characters. Worse yet, should people I know read my work, god forbid, they might read me directly into it. But Drevlow tackles the big stuff with guts.
He tackles frank conversations with a partner. How honesty never involves them gushing about you. How an ex can move so far beyond you they don't recognize your number when you can't even begin to get over them. How depression could make you too flaccid to masturbate.
And reading Drevlow's honest approach to such things will make the reader a bit more honest with themselves, about their own trash and their own trashy lives. In other words, it's really good poetry.
Available now from Anxiety Press.
Amid the detritus of our daily lives of waste–crumpled flyers, a bondaged Barbie doll, mixed breed mutts (called herein "trash dogs" of course), abandoned roombas, an empty pizza box that becomes a scribble pad–Drevlow muses on the bigger things that can really trash up our lives with a brutally honest look at love, ex-love, parenthood failure, suicide, and sexual prowess (mostly the lack thereof).
I write this a bit dirty. I just changed the brake pads on my Toyota. My face is covered in dried sweat and soot. My thumb is bleeding where my knuckle scraped something harder than my knuckle when my wrench slipped off the brake caliper. My shirt still has bits of leaves and tiny pebbles stuck to it from laying in the driveway so I could put the jack in just the right spot to lift.
Drevlow's verse herein is similarly soiled. His trash poems drip with real life grit and grime. If his thoughts on love and sex and life sit somewhere between a dumpster behind a Domino's, time on the toilet, and a dog's dick, well, that's just honesty. The big things exist alongside every day waste and muck.
I've always admired Drevlow's candor in his fiction and poetry and in everything he writes. He has an ability to cut to the absolute core of existence in ways I'm not always able to face in my own writing. Like, if I write too much about love or sex or the worth-it-ness of this world, this life, it might make the reader wonder about my own inadequacies as they relate to such topics when I want them to focus on my characters. Worse yet, should people I know read my work, god forbid, they might read me directly into it. But Drevlow tackles the big stuff with guts.
He tackles frank conversations with a partner. How honesty never involves them gushing about you. How an ex can move so far beyond you they don't recognize your number when you can't even begin to get over them. How depression could make you too flaccid to masturbate.
And reading Drevlow's honest approach to such things will make the reader a bit more honest with themselves, about their own trash and their own trashy lives. In other words, it's really good poetry.
Available now from Anxiety Press.
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