Reviews

City of Insomnia
By Victor D. Infante
2008 Write Bloody Publishing
Nashville, Tennessee
ISBN: 9-780981-521329

Infante’s City of Insomnia invites you into a mecca of haunting tales, desperate histories, and pop culture fetishisms. And love (‘That Was Then’). He doesn’t deny the world we live in from infiltrating the craft of poetry. ‘Waiting for the End of the World’ is devastatingly imagined like the science fiction reality of a Philip K. Dick novel: “It’s 3 a.m. and you’re wearing Vegas like a crown./The apocalypse leaves a burnt-hair aftertaste. The skyline is on fire./We drank the last of the gasoline with tequila.”

If any poem defines the pop culture fetish of Infante’s poetic flight, it is the incomparable ‘Warhol Days.’ ‘Warhol Days’ is a mixed tape of “the pop stardom draft” including the dream of dancing through the “fluorescent-lit aisles of every Wal-Mart superstore” because “… in America, someone’s always watching.” He reminds us that we watch, and do little to hide the desire to be seen and look good doing whatever we can to arrest those clichéd fifteen minutes of fame, no matter how mundane our actions: “This street is a cinema. The neighbors watch each other when they’re/shoveling snow, the sinuous pull of muscle and frigid bone/captured in a dozen picturesque screenplays…The eye is the world’s most/perfect camera, pulling light from the sky with only water and/flesh–crystal-clear imaging, better and faster than digital. The/unfettered human eye should make Spielberg weep with shame.”

Infante’s voyeuristic view of pop culture and history echo throughout ‘There is No Word for ‘Fear of Culture’’, ‘American July,’ and ‘iTunes kicks up Matthew’s song for Kathleen Hietala.’ His poems resonate with this generation of thirty-somethings; even ‘Undressing Virginia Dare’ will make Neil Gaimen fans shutter with delight.

City of Insomnia is a keeper collection. You’ll keep reading these poems over and over with fear that you may have missed something.

-Heather J. Macpherson, Editor, BSPJ