Banango Lit

I liked this book by Diana Salier.

I didn’t expect to like it, because I have started to feel lately that this style of poetry/ writing in general has become too prevalent in the online lit community. These poems are very matter-of-fact. The reader is told everything that happens, and oftentimes it feels like the reader is also told what to think about what they are told. Spencer Madsen’s book “a million bears” did not make me feel this way, and Diana Salier’s book does not either.

So, what is it that makes these books (this one in particular since this is a review of it) effective while other Internet Poets writing in similar styles seem to fail?

I’m not entirely sure. I could speculate that it is Salier’s great use of the line break. Or her great use of language. Maybe it is that each image, while very familiar, also feels very original. A good example of this is in the poem “this poem is a chatroom and you have left the chatroom”

this poem is a chatroom
and you have left the chatroom
while i was away from the computer
so i didn’t realize you had signed off
and gotten a glass of water
and gone to bed

The language here is familiar, yet the way Salier uses it seems wholly original. Who would think to compare a poem to a chatroom?

There are, of course, a few poems in the collection that don’t hit the mark. A poem like “i found you, ms. new booty” seems to not strive hard enough to deal with the sense of humanity found in many of the other poems. But in general, the poems do this. They tell us a little bit about human emotion and being human and being Diana Salier.

So buy this book if you have money. Or read the e-book version.

(Poems you should read from this book if I had to pick three that were not previously mentioned: “let’s make the world so quiet again”, “what about the dinosaur problem”, and “my gmail makes you laugh so hard”.)

PS, buy the book here.

-Justin