review: Devils, Dice & Car Parts

Review compliments of Prospero's Bookstore

Hang on to your britches kiddies; this ain't your mama's poetry! (nor, for that matter, is it the sterile spewings of fluorescent dissertations). Jason Ryberg's long awaited follow-up to his 1996 Physics of Context - Devils, Dice and Car Parts packs all the black-tar wallop a heroin rush.

Simply put, Ryberg is one of the most powerful poets plying the trade in this here ocean of wheat and asphalt we call Middle America.

Across the hum and smack of a neighborhood watering-hole (his natural environs), Ryberg's longshoreman's physique can be a bit intimidating. Yet once engaged, the words flow. There is a resonance to their tones, an artifice of phrasing that lends gritty animation to the observations and musings of an artistic mind acutely, and often painfully, awake.

Those who have heard Jason read know full well that his ruminations command a room's attention - his subject matter, the stuff of our lives (at least the lives we secretly wish we lived).

Ryberg's poems delve where the shuck and jive of smoky jazz clubs rub up against the dusty recollections of lonesome farm roads. Where the Devil himself is, '…rackin' balls and talking trash/ punching tunes and pinching ass…' where '…the boiler-rooms/ of all the world/ are just about/ to blow… where …two old boys/ sit on the front porch… hootin' at all/ the sweet young things…their bones/ ancient humming architectures/ of radio towers and tuning forks.

The objects of his fierce scrutiny are the stuff of questionable, late-night appetites. A knuckle-bruiser, Ryberg's dialectic bobs and weaves. With his left he sets us up - '3 AM/and a bell/ goes off somewhere/ in the dank/ cavernous/ sub-basement/ of my skull… With his right, he jakes us one, crashing into the all too familiar head-games of our own psyches where - …the surly, pissy demon/ of Pernicious Debt… and …the voracious troll/ of Conspicuous/ Consumption… …know/ that …before anyone/ may enter/ the Kingdome of Dreams/ they must first walk/ through the Garden/of Punishment.

Careening from the pages of Devils, Dice and Car Parts are dank rumblings, the foreplay of loneliness, the last chance crack of pool balls, galaxies of stars and crickets and the fluorescent promise of love gone way wrong.

If you believe in raw wind, skin-tight jeans and the double strike of lightening, I admonish you to grab a copy of Devils, Dice and Car Parts before they all blow away in a Kansas tornado.