RaveThe Brooklyn RailRainbow Milk is among the more convincing debuts I have read in years. It is also one of the more humane. Mendez allows Jesse to articulate his thoughts and feelings without exploiting his struggles for cheap consumption ... Mendez’s \'graphic\' depictions of anal and oral intercourse throughout Rainbow Milk are essential to an understanding of Jesse’s psychological and emotional trajectory. His sexual hunger speaks to broader concerns, not least of all financial desperation. It would be morally appalling to gloss over such moments in his experience in order to maintain literary decorum ... As important as ideas are to Rainbow Milk , the novel is equally distinctive for its architectonics and style. Mendez builds effective long scenes tense with sexual possibility and doubt. Said scenes promise (or sometimes threaten) explosive release but terminate before climax, ensuring his emotional and sexual frustration will continue through vast portions of the book ... Paul Mendez has created a character of genuine depth and dimension, someone whose searching haunts the reader’s mind long after one returns the book to a shelf.
Bob Kaufman, Ed. by Neeli Cherkovski, Raymond Foye, and Tate Swindell
RaveThe Brooklyn Rail... makes the case that Kaufman was more than the sum of various discrete identities. Beyond his Beat and jazz affiliations, beyond his connections to surrealism, and beyond his love for poetry as performance, he embodies the quest of one individual in relentless pursuit of an authentic self through uninhibited creative acts ... Kaufman observes, records, and reflects upon the degrading conditions of his environment without self-pity, often tracking others’ sufferings and his own inner disturbance with impressive restraint ... Ultimately, what each section of The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman demonstrates over and over is how present each poem is in the moment of its creation, as if the creative impulse asserts itself as naturally as breath. Instead of chiseling perfectly sculpted poems of Parnassian splendor, the poet’s arch, apt, and often wild work is an unmediated extension of the man who, by 1955, had already sailed the world as a member of the National Maritime Union and later, in San Francisco, climbed on top of stopped cars to recite spontaneous verse. Complicated, observant, yet uniquely uncorrupted and vulnerable, Kaufman earns the much overused and oft-misunderstood adjective \'original.\' His poems are suffused with humility, authority, and something approaching \'Laughter on exotic beds.\'
Eduardo C. Corral
PositiveLambda LiteraryBy any standard, Slow Lightning is an impressive debut, a gathering of powerful and often defiant poems that are paradoxically realized through formal control ... Nowhere are raw energy and aesthetic refinement juxtaposed more effectively than in \'Border Triptych,\' three sonnets connected by theme ... Humorous, horrifying, understated and resistant, the entire three-part poem should be required reading in high schools across the country ... Titles—like borders and poetic forms—are hierarchical constructs that shape and inform our understanding of reality. Throughout Slow Lightning, Corral delights in exploiting such constructs to counter traditional narratives. He could have come crashing through the gates, but Corral’s resistance is slyer and arguably more effective.
