SHORT SHOTS REVIEWED BY HUGH FOX

Shorts Shots by Alan Catlin was reviewed by Hugh Fox for Small Press Review.


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Review:
Short Shots
By Alan Catlin
2009; 64pp; Pa;
Alternating Current,
POB 398058, Cambridge,
MA 02139. $3.00 + $2.00 for
shipping.

Forget the [2 1/8 x 2 3/4 inch] size (which makes it look toyishly and unnecessarily weird [,]but at the same time fascinating) and get to the poems themselves, reality-bound, ironic, sarcastic streetwise, 100% realistic world-photos of the essential US of Now:

Drunk young woman
sleeping on the bar

a pair of angel's wings
tattooed on her shoulder blades,

where she was headed
she was going to need
all the help she could get. (p. 14)

Anywhere you go in the contemporary US, any bar, street, park, you name it, and you'll see a plethora of the reality that Catlin is talking about. Especially bars. After all, Catlin (one of The Master Poet's Gang since the 70's) worked for twenty-five years as a bartender in Albany, New York's Washington Tavern, so you're going to find a lot of bar-lore here:

He drank the way he
was talking, all sloppy
and confused, like any
minute now he'd turn
into something evil
like in the movies,
turn into something
you didn't want to see
again ever, but would
never forget, no matter
how hard you tried. ("Dead Head," p. 37)

It's refreshing to leave abstractionism, surrealism, you-guess-it-isms and Victorian romanticism for a change and get into the real world in real time, a world away from bytes and economic game-plans into the reality of the marginal population on the edge of totally dropping out/dropping dead. Especially in this kind of direct real-talk mode.
End Of Review
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