The Advantages of Cable
Mark Young
ISBN: 9781938521867
96 pages
$US12.50
URL: https://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-young/the-advantages-of-cable/paperback/product-pq8rdn.html
Mark Young’s The Advantages of Cable focuses on unexpected losses of focus, sudden changes in focal length, and spontaneous cracks in the lens, cracks that fracture, negate or enhance our immediate experience. Our “habitat” is over-defined, and not hospitable, but these sudden tricks of light (or of mind) produce visions of flying ostriches, angry crows, and blood-drinking salamanders: moments when "everybody freezes” and starts speaking “the language of the gypsies,” all the "small things” that open us up to losing “all track” of the fatal limitations of our “habitat.”
Reading Mark’s poems is like getting stuck in the revolving door of Marshall Fields, Myer, Selfridge’s, or any large department store. We suddenly realize we’re stuck, recognize our situation very differently than we did ten seconds ago, and can hear each of Mark’s poems as the tink of a ball peen hammer on the glass, trying to free us. — Scott MacLeod
The Advantages of Cable is how “cable” in all of its manifestations enable the poet to write the world in the persona of world. Its poems are meta as well as metaphysical. That’s how a poem like “Some Other Thing” doesn’t just end in well-wrought imagery but also in significance: “the glaze on / a Japanese bowl, water / caught by sunlight, snow / on low mountains, or / a crow croaking its anger / from the next door / mango tree which has / not yet come into flower.” Mark Young is writing, albeit slyly, at the peak of not just his but the world’s poetic prowess and power. — Eileen R. Tabios
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