If You So Desire: Poems

Joseph Gastiger's new book is a loving, outrageous, krazy kat biography of the Vietnam generation hooked to the poet's imagination and his lifelong pursuit of the marvelous. Everything happens in these poems: the dead walk (or swim), Muammar Qaddafi says he did it all for love, the long lost political turmoil of the Nixon years reappears bristling with subtexts, Astro Boy is sold to a robotic circus, the poet/speaker wanders among his early loves and experiences like a burglar with flashlights taped to his shoes.

Yet the poems, sweet and half comic as many of them are, are also deadly serious in their critique of the violence, ignorance, and anger that haunt every human community. The language throughout is quick, supple, heartbreaking and original in every way possible and provides a menu of startling possibilities for the prose poem form. Gastiger has given us a very fine gift.