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| Enter the 2008 Book Prize |
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Runner-up in the 2006 National
Poetry Review Book Prize
by Dan Kaplan Dan Kaplan's Bill's Formal Complaint featured in the Oregonian |
| In Dan Kaplan’s provocative new book, Bill’s
Formal Complaint, we encounter American neo-surrealism at its finest in the form of
Bill, the quirky representative of our privileged discontent with living. Bill immediately
takes us everywhere and nowhere, flaunting his eponymous history, then leading us
breathlessly into the netherworld of dream and the accidental beauties of
miscommunication, only to escort us out of it with the same uncertainty: who was Bill?
(“How Would You Describe Him?”) The title poem captures the psyche of the book
as it ritualizes the contemporary tendency to blame our progenitors for our physical and
spiritual failures. The form of choice, used to brilliant effect, is the sonnet, which
Kaplan synchronizes to Bill’s level of anguish: “…The dream never
varies,/only the piece. Who said that? Or maybe//it goes recurrence is comfort and
curse./That’s it. Recurrence is comfort and curse.” (“Ordinarily #2) We can
almost hear the ghost of Miroslav Holub, the great Czech poet, whispering from Pilsen a
possible preface to this book: “Mummy, come here, there’s a dead
devil—” but what follows is the story only Bill can tell. —Larissa Szporluk A chicken in orbit, an armless orchestra, all
manner of objects wobbly and surreal, dire and dear, inhabit this haggard landscape of
non-stop linguistic playfulness that flickeringly translates into Bill, or Billness, or
Billessence—a life-like postmodern everyman whose languagey bits coalesce long enough
to give voice to this unforgettable complaint. What a funny, crafty, wise, warm, virtuosic
debut! |
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| Dan Kaplan is also the author of the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red Hydra Press, 2005), a collaboration between Cuban and American book artists. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, POOL, the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere.He lives in Portland, Oregon. | ||
