The Charnel House on Joyce Kilmer Avenue by Rob Cook

By g emil reutter

I have known for some time by reading the works of Rob Cook that spirits, visions may haunt him. Or maybe not. Just maybe Cook views life a bit differently than most. Unlike most, his imagination pours forth in imagery and character driven prose that has given birth to his latest effort, The Charnel House on Joyce Kilmer Avenue. It is a slim 44 page offering that at first will leave you with the feeling, what the hell is going on here? Yet as one reads on the creative genius that is Rob Cook spills out upon page after page.

He introduces us to the main character, a college student, the narrator, who enters his new residence with books buried in his knapsack, hears a phone ring the way it is supposed to, hears the television telling stories the way it is trusted to tell those stories and who sees a smile hurry across the ceiling. His roommates come and go and then there are none except for the dead children in the dining room that does not have a table or chairs. In fact, when he is left alone there is no furniture at all. The narrator is mostly surrounded by silence and loneliness, one roommate sits in silence and never speaks. There is the girlfriend who lives in another city yet is never seen or heard. A college professor of self-importance who has lost his chin and a stalker who no one would understand stalking the narrator. Struggling with acne the narrator battles with hard lump surrounded by blackheads, a zit with “monstrous potential”.

There is Carl the roommate with the big boots who clumps up and down the stairs. Who picks the clumps of the narrator’s hair from the shower drain and deposits them by his toothbrush. And then there is this:

The toilet, clear as it was, smelled like the insides of a poet who wasted his life listening for the soundless snowfall of the day’s mail drifting through the door’s one crack of hope.

When asked what he does, the narrator claims to be a failed musician, or a student for he believes if he says he is a poet as a grown man he will not be fondly looked upon. There is Lincoln on the five dollar bill, gaunt and frowning at the narrator before Lincoln turns away.

The last thing Carl says is: Good luck with those friends of yours. There are many in the home without furniture at The Charnel House on Joyce Kilmer Avenue.

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You can find the book here: https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780998187273/the-charnel-house-on-joyce-kilmer-avenue.aspx

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g emil reutter is a writer of poems and stories. He can be found at: https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/

Diary of Tadpole the Dirtbag

Rain Mountain Press – July 2016

2^nd Edition

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Review by g emil reutter

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Rob Cook lives in a world entirely his own. It is a world of light and dark, of sadness and humor but isn’t that the way it is for all people? Unlike others Cook travels to the edges of life and dips his toe if not his entire foot into the other side.

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There are letters in this collection like the poets James Wright and Richard Hugo included in some of their collections only in Cook’s collection the letters are written from Tadpole to himself, after all it is a diary… of sorts. The poems are harsh realism at its best but surprisingly in the midst of it all, a gentle sweetness and outstanding images brim forth.

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In the poem, Football Field Jan, about a chat line hook up that goes badly when of course the woman does not have the features she told him on the telephone that he documents in great detail comes this line. … her body seemed like the outcome of four decades/ of weeping and not throwing away the tears. The poem, The Night that Almost Lost its Eyes of another encounter he did not follow through on he gives us, We don’t believe in lights, she said. Everything is so much more honest in the dark.

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From the poem Ed Glory:

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Last night I tried to correct

Myself in the mirror

I’m looking more like a spoon every day.

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I have stones falling through me

until they feel like gowns

easing from my bones.

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From the poem In the In Wasted North of Twenty One:

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I want this thing

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to disappear, she said, and added

talking to you I feel like

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I’ve already disappeared

I didn’t know if we were

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making a family

to hide, but while

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the clock held us together

with its claws

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and giant stones and glaciers

moved

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across the sky toward

Pennsylvania.

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In Diary of Tadpole the Dirtbag, Rob Cooks once again reveals a voice that is uniquely his own.

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You can find the book here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780980221121/diary-of-tadpole-the-dirtbag-second-edition.aspx

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g emil reutter is a writer of poems and stories. You can find him here: https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/