Country: USA
Genre: Prose poetry (Yep!)
Pages: 64
How that little poem collection ended up on my reviewing desk is actually a pretty funny story. I've been wrestling for eight years and I am an advocate of its soul-cleansing virtues. When I was approached to review this book I was like "Meh, I'm not a very good audience for poetry", but then I was told the title and my stance on it turned a hundred and eighty degrees to: "Holy Shit! I have to read this". An emergency room strike me as a deliciously tasteless place to wrestle and a writer who would think about such a thing strike immediate and automatic cool points with me. The Dirty Poet's EMERGENCY ROOM WRESTLING is not quite your traditional poetry collection, it's more of a demented tour in one of the barometers of our ill society. It's not as much as poems or a straight story as it is the feeling of a place nobody wants to be in.
Now I've never reviewed poetry before, so please excuse the abstract nature of my words.
There are sixty four pages and about the same number of poems (maybe around sixty) and they are closed entities in themselves. They are patients, families, hospital workers, people, days in the life of The Dirty Poet, who from the sound of it, works at a nurse or some other function on the battlefront. In such little text, you will experience life, death, illness, stupidity, belligerence, hope, despair and many other chaotic emotions that flow through an emergency room on a daily basis. It's a place where single days look like weeks, months when it's getting bad. The Dirty Poet uses the form to communicate this emotion a lot better than I think any prose fiction could do. It's very hard to do justice to human misery when it comes wholesale and The Dirty Poet pulls it off.
Now, as far as the language and the form are concern, what actually seduced me about EMERGENCY ROOM WRESTLING is that it didn't bother with anything else but to aim for the most pinpoint accurate words. I like that. There is no rhymes, but there is rhythm and images that will stick with you for a long time. It's short and sweet and well worth about the hour of your time it will take your to read it. EMERGENCY ROOM WRESTLING is a window on a crossroads in the lives of people who have a sick body, a sick mind or a sick soul. They all meet in the emergency room.