JOHN DEWITT – 20 20 PRETZELS
Published November 2020 (Second printing December 2022)
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Can I have a water?And and or orA bowl of oceanic feelings bungled and split?
Perhaps the first set of poems to ever emerge from the twinned influences of Etel Adnan and DJ Screw, John DeWitt’s set of entwined pretzel-stanzas presents 2020 vision for 2020. Versed in psychoanalytic word-scapes, DeWitt’s poems slither, swim, crawl, sputter and stutter with wit, alarm, concision and “puns out of your league”. Here are oceanic feelings, sea creatures, cruel depths, drums, dreams, “the wordical odor of thing at odds with my anecdotes”, variables, being born into speech, being lost for words, skullduggery, apologies, work, failure, assholes in cars, the letter o, dogs, swine, “the afterlife strike”, a Yamaha in the basement, summer, a dice rolling by itself, grammar, “method kink”, the river of poetry, the house of language, a large dose of pain, digging into the wound, 5AM fries, screen memories, origins, lemons, watermelons, ten penny nails, the ghost of dead people, wrinkle theory, puns, potatoes. “You don’t know what you is / and you don’t know what you ain’t either.”
JOHN DEWITT was born in Mexico City, later moved to Nashville, and now lives in Paris. He is the author of Ends (Tipped Press, 2011), Visceral Apocrypha (Shit Valley, 2013) and The Neckless Spokesperson of the Garden of Earthly Delights (Face Press, 2019), and (as ‘Bill Ding’), co-wrote Buildings with Rosa van Hesnbergen (Tipped Press, 2012).
A5, 52 pp, saddle-stitch.