Fishbone

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

It should tell you something about Fishbone that this incredibly slim volume, which has been out of print for only a few years, is presently commanding prices on the open market that equate to approximately six dollars and fifty-seven cents per page. You can get that sort of scratch for an original Codex Seraphinius (currently selling for nineteen grand) or, at the height of the craze, before it was released in a trade paperback, a first edition of King's The Gunslinger. But for art or a popular story collection, even, that might make sense. How to explain it for a book of poetry, an artistic medium currently enjoying the least amount of favor in its history in America? More, how to explain it for a poet that criminally few people have ever heard of?

Actually, it's quite simple: because Aimee Nezhukumatathil, despite having only a small following, has the same sort of small following as did, say, David Koresh. We are few in number, but make no mistake, we are fanatics. We have discovered one of those few writers who is struggling to hold the American literary presence together, and of those few, one of the best, and we will simultaneously hoard the sacred words and proselytize to the ends of the earth until Aimee Nez gets the recognition she deserves. Her name rests quite easily among such other giants of modern America poetry as Hayden Carruth and Ira Sadoff. (And if you don't know who those two are, shame on you.)

So why am I only giving Fishbone four stars, all that said? Actually, it's because I read Miracle Fruit first. Many of the poems here look familiar. Not because they all share Nezhukumatathil's wonderful, visceral style, but because many of them are the same poems. (One wonders if the person who just paid $184 for a copy on amazon knew this beforehand.) Now, don't get me wrong-- these poems are well worth reading, no matter how you come by them. But Miracle Fruit is much easier to come by these days, and will set you back a lot less cash. But if you happen to find a copy of this at your local used bookstore, I suggest grabbing it. Not only because it's a great book of poems, but because you can make a ten thousand or so percent profit on it pretty fast.