Review of Inside the Splintered Wood by Myles Gordon

Nothing makes sense in this unfathomable, brutish life. Nothing. Still one must bear the ultimate burden of individual responsibility. Existentialism never worked for me as prose literature. Well, perhaps there were a couple of books—Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Words. Other books by these same authors, not so much. Myles Gordon, however, using this same existential mindset of free will in the face of absurdity, makes poems of a consistently high quality that matter. The details of his book, Inside The Splintered Wood, are mostly confessional and not for the squeamish. That said, Gordon has a knack for odd personal memories and irrational humor that propels one through his pieces. For more of my review of The Splintered Wood go here: http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2013/08/inside-splintered-wood-poems-by-myles.html