19 Names for Our Band

This is a youthful book, as its title implies, in as much as rock n’ roll belongs yet to the young. Its debut concerns are those of the youth culture in as much as when we are young we are closer to home, to origin, to the primal disjunctions supplied by our gaps/leaps in understanding. Huffman’s poems enact a sweet mojo on the youthful territory of the hometown, of the high school, of the TV-watching-music-listening experience. A series of sporadically appearing poems with the title Very Early in the Life of Jerome acts as a placeholder in the reading mind for these territories, enacted as they are in the comfortable vernacular of immediate, casual speech: When I am fourteen on the diving board, please start by saying I am fifteen and deny you were ever there. Other poems allow for a steeper climb on the merry-go-round of associative logic, by which we are given to understand this poet’s effortless commitment to literary surfaces.