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The Memory Factory. Jackie Sheeler ( Buttonwood Press POBOX 206 Champaign, IL. 61824-0206)
jackie.poetz.com
Jackie Sheeler is a born and bred New Yorker, curates a Greenwich Village reading series, and has her own literary web site http://www.poetz.com Not only that, she writes a mean poem. In her collection, MEMORY FACTORY, Sheeler's poems are hard-boiled and right on the mark. It's as if she's saying, " "What the reader needs is a slap in the face and the cold butt of a 45." In her poem,DELORATION/ OUTER BOROUGH STYLE, Sheeler wipes the romantic sheen off the old adage, " You never forget your first time." " There was no blood, no pleasure, no pain, no/reason to bother with that boy any more, now that it was done/this comedy of virgins/on polyester rugs/But he left me/with a remnant of himself, to be carried.../all these years after I was filled/then emptied and promised/ nothing but silence." DIRTY and FAMILIAR rails against the cancer of gentrification, that spreads its sterile tendrils over all the neon, the cheap fare and the familiar urban buffet that gives places like Coney Island its character: " Please don't let them clean up Coney Island-- Let the Cyclone's wooden bones ricket and splinter while/ the neon splender of Nathan's dominates the corner of Stilwell and Surf." This is a fine, "dirty gem" of a collection, that you , dear reader, should get his or her hot little hands on.
Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ April 2002.
Review.
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