The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar

The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar is Quincy R. Lehr’s ferocious new collection, his first book since 2014’s Heimat. Frequently laugh-out-loud funny but always dead serious, these poems are topical, allusive, angry, and often satirical, but with a vulnerable emotional core. Lehr’s verse avoids easy sloganeering, but one can shake one’s fist to its indignant cadences. Political without didacticism, emotional without sentimentality, and formal without a whiff of archaism, The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar evokes a place where Biblical figures rub shoulders with Aleister Crowley, where kitsch insinuates itself into the Classics, and where the bar is open a bit later than is strictly advisable. It is a book to stir the imagination and make the bozos cry like little children.