Last Man In

Jargon 107.
Narrative poetry told from inside a Mexican jail during 1962 and 1963. Bound in black cloth with yellow spine label. Jacket photographs of mummies from the Church of Guanajuato, Mexico by Ron Nameth. NEW in publisher's mylar.

"These poems are narrative and multivocal; they could be radiophonic, but varied strophic forms (pulses) give them a solidly textual aspect. A main voice relays in solos an ensemble of other voices. All the voices are telling stories, while the main voice vividly complicates the threads of story into clusters of hallucinatory images. Narrative line and imaginative volume, alternating in a zigzag antiphony, disclose the essential scene: a Mexican jail. From it the actual world outside is only glimpsed on occasion: but in it the voices--Spanish, Anglo, or hybrid--are constantly rising fresh 'cells' open to startle their hardbitten denizens out: words or convicts. Not a phrase in this grim, precisely featured, colorful De Profundis falls back on literary props or poetic allure, yet (capriciously or not) mythic allusions do figure at intervals in the circuit where 'line' and 'volume' collide, coalesce, or split apart." - Christopher Middleton