Review of Even The Dead Are Growing Old

I hated these poems shortly before I liked them. They irritate. They grate. They steal your comfort. They screw you up from toe to head with their revelations of dark cruelty and bright cityscapes of emptiness. But pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle you get to see the down and dirty desperateness and shellacked heroism of an Urban Everyman’s life—maybe your own.

 Cold Fact, the first poem in this collection, confronts you with the callousness of unfettered capitalism. The poet fearlessly states his case,

 

you can find in evil good

if you are good enough.

But where’s the good in

“Ideally you’d have every factory

you own on a barge, tow it to where

 

labor costs were the lowest.”? Still,

small towns withhold

their terminal truth, too afraid

or indolent or drugged to ask

who is fucking them,

 

I mean really…

 

The poem continues with a litany of families broken apart and individuals gone bad due to government supported decisions of greed glutted corporate bureaucrats.  I know something about this subject and I have seen those families in real time. I saw a work force of 16,000 decimated to less than 3000 employees with little transitional training of any value.   Their jobs moved to other countries on that “barge” Winter mentions. The human beings themselves seemed to just vaporize.  http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2013/01/even-dead-are-growing-old-poems-by-don.html