The Printer's Error (The Miami University Press Poetry Series)

Poetry. Both funny and serious, this second poetry collection by Aaron Fogel matches stories with joltingly non-narrative poems. It mixes traditional forms like the villanelle with counter-forms like double alliteration, nine-syllable lines, words with all the vowel-letters crushed into them ("unsynchromadice"), and words with numbers interrupting the letters ("we5re"). Fogel's poems amount to what used to be called pasquinade or menippean satire, a lower-middle class art that refuses to buy into the easy caricatures of that class. The book includes a poem about a young man named Brat who breaks a sculptural portrait of himself done by his father; a prose-poem about Yiddish; and a set of comic sketches about the mock-sorrows of academic life, family aging, and the place of low jokes in poetry.