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Cool Limbo

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Poetry. LGBT Studies. COOL LIMBO is a series of dazzling portraits that are accessible yet complex, hilarious yet poignant, down-to-earth yet ethereal. Like its cover, which features the title poem's sexy 70s chick lounging—stoned—by the pool (as she neglects the water-winged kids she's supposed to be babysitting), the book is the best kind of party—unofficial, unpretentious, and unabashed. And everyone's there "on plastic lawn furniture...with six packs and lit " From Liz Taylor, Gertrude Stein, and The Golden Girls, to Orpheus, Vanity Smurf, and Stevie Nicks. Poem after poem, these figures somehow mingle with the poet, in the not-so-still life studies of his boisterous family and friends, building a narrative about the departure from suburbia to the big city (from the ghost of a boy to a realized though sometimes-haunted man)—all while commenting on, as Elaine Equi puts it, the "constantly shifting sexual codes" assigned to men and women alike. Few places can you find a poem about a gay porn star that concerns itself with the meaning of objectivity and art just pages after a charged feminist manifesto called "If Hello Kitty Had a Mouth." But beyond that colorful variety of subject and theme, not to mention his mastery of dialogue and what Mark Bibbins calls "devious one-liners," what's most remarkable about this poet in his debut collection is his ability to confront the serious and painful while never abandoning his sharp sense of humor and playful spirit.

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2011

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About the author

Michael Montlack

7 books2 followers
Michael Montlack is the editor of the essay anthology MY DIVA: 65 GAY MEN ON THE WOMEN WHO INSPIRE THEM (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) and the author of three poetry chapbooks: COVER CHARGE (Winner of the 2007 Gertrude Prize) and GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS (Pudding House, 2008) and THE SLIP (Poets Wear Prada, 2009). His work has appeared in CIMARRON REVIEW, SWINK, THE NEW YORK QUARTERLY, POET LORE, COURT GREEN, COLUMBIA POETRY REVIEW, MIPOESIAS and other journals. Recently he was awarded residencies from Ucross (Wyoming), Soul Mountain Retreat(Connecticut), VCCA (Virginia) and Lambda Literary Retreat(California). He splits his time between New York City (where he teaches at Berkeley College) and San Francisco, and has just finished writing his first novel. "

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Author 3 books17 followers
May 31, 2012
If any poetry collection by a first-time author can be called “much anticipated,” Cool Limbo (NYQ Books) is it. Michael Montlack, editor of the Lambda Literary Award-nominated essay collection My Diva, has been entertaining audiences at readings for the past decade with poems that are consistently witty, edgy and sharp; at their best, they cut right to the bone.

Among a newer generation of poets, Montlack bridges the modern/postmodern divide by moving with ease from tight formal and free-verse poems to looser performance-driven pieces, and by employing Classical and Biblical allusions as often as he drops ’70s and ’80s pop-culture references like Lynyrd Skynrd and Hello Kitty. The result is a fascinating literary decoupage.

“Liz Taylor in Levittown,” one of the book’s standouts, finds the speaker on the cusp of gay adolescence, doing homework in a Long Island kitchen while his mother watches Elizabeth Taylor on television; a regular occurrence, only this time her idol is alerting the world to AIDS:

[…] I could have a glimmer of hope
when Liz invited us—the world, America, Moms like you—
to ask Where would we be without these people
we passively watch die?
These incredible people…who contribute so much?

The poems about childhood in Cool Limbo manage to be touching, even romantic, without being bathetic or sentimental; thought-provoking, but not polemical. In “Fighting Fire,” a boy receives a plastic bullhorn from his friend,

the hollow horn’s mouth aligned with your own
like a kiss I could see inside,
one that amplified some unspoken urgency,
a pre-adolescent emergency:
my own inner fire.

Other poems, like “If Hello Kitty Had a Mouth,” are cheeky crowd-pleasers that, though they work best when read live, still sparkle on the page. “A Golden Girls Prayer,” a paean to those eponymous ’80s sitcom seniors, is especially hilarious (“so that I will… / first see the generosity in my slutty, bitchy and stupid friends,” or “so that I might… / just once say, ‘I’ll be out on the lanai’”).

The prose poem “Stein on Bishop” is an absolute delight, employing Gertrude Stein’s bewildering syntax to offer a brief disquisition on the poetry of another lesbian icon, Elizabeth Bishop. If this seems risky, Montlack takes the further risk of trying the technique twice in the same collection, but his hubris pays off.

The sequel, called “Gertrude, you had Alice. But I had him (so briefly) and now we don’t even talk,” is a winner, using Stein’s obsessive repetition to great effect: “You could just call. You could. You could say something. Something about anything. About anything you might want to call him about. About him not calling….”

Chock-full of literary experiments, topical references, unabashed sexual themes, and a raconteur’s easy tone, Cool Limbo takes the kinds of risks that first books rarely do. At 100 pages (almost twice the number typical for a debut collection), even the length is risky.

With so many poems, it’s reasonable to expect that a few don’t achieve divine status, but the payoff is that there’s something in Cool Limbo for everyone, ranging from cool to downright ingenious.
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