Last Notes from A Split Peninsula

In a timid age fraught with self-consciousness and convention, Robert Perchan sounds the depths of fresh authenticity, conviction and humor. His poems are an open window on an exotic and true world that is also sentimentally universal. A journey and an education! . . In addition you can shave with Perchan’s poems, they are so surgically acute. I see an occasional mad gleam in the eyes of someone on the street and I know what it means: I shaved with one of Bob’s poems. Buy ‘em for their prosody or use in the bath. Andrei Codrescu In a world of poets who all sound the same, Robert Perchan is an original. He is also a comic genius, capable of moving between and blending many different genres and linguistic registers to achieve his purposes. To find oneself in the cross-hairs of Perchan’s wit – when he is not training it squarely on himself -- can be very, very unsettling. And yet he can also be lyrical, and almost all of his hijinks spring from idealism, since, of course, every satirist is really an idealist gone rogue. In the final section of this book, all of Perchan’s talents culminate, as the narrator and his companion Miss Kim, a sort of Ensorcellor/Sidekick/Ecdysiast/Helpmeet/Muse, go on a metaphysical exploration of a world around them, which is often as maddening as it is amusing. How can you not like a book with prose poems that begin with: “Onward and Awkward might serve as a fair clinical description of the case of evolutionary heebie-jeebies I have had to endure since the recent capitulation of the slightly sway-backed but nonetheless anatomically correct Miss Kim to certain suggestions I made regarding the human coccyx.” Pure Perchan. Peter Johnson, author of Old Man Howling at the Moon and Miracles & Mortifications and recipient of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets