Divided into five sections, the American poet and translator Taylor Mignon's first solo collection of poetry begins with his "Juvenilia."
The section includes alphabet poems, intricate plays on words, and paeans to bodily functions and excreta. The poems — referencing Camus, Rimbaud, Ginsberg, "Blade Runner," Radiohead, Joy Division, and, I would hazard a guess, Captain Beefheart: "Oh, skyscraper window shiner moonshine" — are fun to read, their dissonance and alliteration creating mind nodes and tying the tongue in knots.
The second section "Homage" is exactly what it says — a poetic homage to influences on Mignon's life and work: Shiraishi Kazuko, Laura Davidson, Cid Corman, plus a number of found poems dedicated to William S. Burroughs. The poems are surrealist riffs on language, similar to Clark Coolidge's paradiddle-rhythms, reflective and experimental, imagistic and (discordantly) musical. By throwing seemingly unrelated words and images together, Mignon juxtaposes meaning and sense, recombining the possibilities of memory and autobiography: