Book Review

To Lose & To Pretend
by Chris O. Cook
Brooklyn Arts Press, 2008
www.brooklynartspress.com.
ISBN-10: 1844714977

Chris O. Cook is a mercurial poet. He especially likes the bait and switch, draws me in with lines like, "It's not that I don't get your untouched canvas/I get it, but it sucks" then pulls out the rug with something incomprehensible: "While mean, jack in the bungle//we're up all hours drawing girls sewn up in ivy." I'ma who? I'ma wha?

Cook fills To Lose & To Pretend with rambling non-sequiturs, and ultimately the collection works because the oddities manage to trace out some meaning. Or, if it's not meaning per se in the accumulation, then it is, at least, some sort of payoff. The challenge of witty poetry is to manage more than just a string of good jokes and keen observations, but by their juxtaposition to create an effect that is greater than the poem's best line. For Cook this must be particularly difficult, since his best lines are really, really good. Here are a few:

from "Admirable Fooling":

Whenever there's a month, I'm amazed it's that month
& it's, like, always a month.

from "God as a Thing, Or Whatever It Is":

Jobs are retarded.

There's no article of men's clothing that makes women horny by itself.
Poetry makes women horny but God doesn't. Suck it, God.

from "I Summoned Am to Tourney":

If I'd had the slightest idea that Girls

Gone Wild was a thing you could invent, I'd have invented it—
but, you know, nice.

from "One! One Poem! Ah, Ah, Ah!" [...certainly one of poetry's most exciting titles]:

In a flowy magenta skirt a girl is worth six girls.

Sure, these excerpts say as much about me for selecting them as they do about the book—but heck if these girlie nuggets don't rear up plenty from poem to poem. So it is a mark of Cook's writerly smarts that, by the last line, I'm not thinking so much about chicks as I am about wtf just happened in the poem—and since there are so many emotional spikes and witty lines, I'm happy to go back to scrutinize it some more. I don't think Cook cares so much about what a poem means as how a poem whatsits, and rightly so. In his strange observation combinations, he communicates something that can't be said.

That's why, when he says at the end of "One! One Poem! Ah, Ah, Ah!" (I mean, c'mon) that "'I love you' just means 'I forgive you for not being perfect',/& you should never forgive anyone for not being perfect", the anti-love advice he's doling out maybe isn't advice at all or even waxing poetic on love, so much as it is playing with "truth" or syllogism or just bombast for a poetic effect. Or hell, I don't know what he's saying because the poem taken as a whole doesn't help, doesn't try to make sense that way—but I doubt he was being literal like the line posits: "you should not love anyone." There are too many amiable quirks and contradictions in To Lose & To Pretend to purchase anything at cost. But if it's artifice, it's a dreamy construction.

I don't care—I care. If you want to read a bunch of poems that follow themselves and bolster preconceptions, don't read these. But Cook knows the rules of poetry and how to defy them, and he knows how to make it worthwhile and fun. Together with the jangled lustiness of the poems, Cook intersperses some jocular po-mo theory. In the book's most emotionally compelling piece, "Lots of People Are Round," he muses about the author-reader relationship and the existence of the poem in the first place,

I could have slept, or written something else,
or you could be sleeping instead of reading this,
you big imaginary teddy bear, you.

Sweet. The problem of existence is always fertile soil, even when the question focuses on the miracle of publication. And the meta-thing, the irony of making a poem about talking to the reader about making a poem is a volatile device, but nothing is lost in Cook's rendering. He says

The thing about things in the movies is, they either have to be visible
or someone has to tell you. This is all a thing I'm telling you,

but that doesn't make me a protagonist,
because nothing actually happened to me either.

That last line is a cryptic one. I can't understand what it means because nothing really happens to anyone in this poem. But he concludes with the things that didn't happen so effectively that the confusion of the line becomes enriching and then, finally, poignant. We can take these first couple negations at face value, but the last two lines, I dunno, I wonder, what's up:

That means I'm not naked & I'm not crying.
I'm not starving & I'm not covered in filth.
It isn't three-thirty in the morning on Christmas Day.
My mother isn't in a world of pain because of me.

Chris O. Cook's To Lose & To Pretend is exciting and smart.—Adam Robinson