John Menesini’s third book of poems opens with a birth and the vaunt “I peed on everyone” and goes from there. The body is a riff in Endo vivid, forceful and at times pertinently disgusting. If Walt Whitman lived in the time of internet porn and the atom bomb he might nod in approval. Whitman however would not have been so terse as in “If a Bus Hit That Bum Now” for which Menesini could be an heir to the Imagists of the early twentieth century:
all the shit litter inside his pockets would turn into glitter
as it explodes from his pantleg
and blows about the highway
in silly sparkly cyclones.
Menesini uses bullets of lines and is not afraid to play with sentence and word choice conventions. Rather than decide on a single forceful adjective he often uses two separated by a slash as in the opener “It Was Too Much and It Was Nothing” where the speaker’s mother “had her knuckles rapped by sadistic/vengeful nuns.” His style is at times prosaic and at others musical. It is plainly stated how his brother Ronin “beat a man to almost death / because that man fed his cat antifreeze / which is sweet so a cat will eat it / then it crystallizes in the kidneys.” While “Another 12-Step Seque…” is a riff on
getting by in it
living and loving in it
taking the ugly in it
trying
one scared ass step at a time
in it
When the setting of a poem is revealed it is usually Pittsburgh which Menesini handles as fondly and as honestly as many poets do their home town. The weather, citizens, sports teams and dichotomous factory sprawl of Pittsburgh all make their appearances. An honesty about recreational and habitual drug use is scattered throughout and is kin with literary big times Bukowski and Kerouac. Boil these two down with the phlegmatic Hemingway and you will have Menesini’s feel which would sit well next to Kevin Rabas or Justin Hynes. Perhaps Menesini does not come out as surefooted as these two however. His oft-repeated technique of pairing words via the slash begins to sound indecisive rather than creative and gives a draft feel to some poems. The inclusion of the word “sketches” in the title may account for these however. In other places he makes very solid decisions with his words, effectively encapsulating feelings in objects as in “Three Cats Did Flips” where the sometimes overwhelmingly tart first bite into an apple comes to stand in for youthful firsts:
Remember when boys couldn’t even talk to girls
and that excitement was so crisp
Granny Smith
Unfortunately, too, for all his affection for Pittsburgh that he does not do more to invite a stranger in. His strongest lines in his “PGH” poems remind me of anywhere and so attach to feelings I am familiar with but do little to give the real circumstances laid out in the poems. The body imagery wanders a bit far from effective realism and into something flatly disgusting in “Shitting and Poetry.” Though, for its overall message this poem could possibly share a beer or two with Ted Hughes’s “Thought Fox” discussing writer’s block and muses.
This collection of poems is built on strong foundations of sound and imagery that should work but there are many loose, missing or rusted screws that give it an uncomfortable, shaking feel.
John Thomas Menesini. Endo. Pittsburgh, PA: Six Gallery Press. ISBN: 978-1-926616-34-6
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