Work, Neighbors, and Ship Disasters

With a sense of the absurd reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, John David Muth considers his job as an academic student counselor, with ominous if hilarious references to such disasters as the Lusitania, the Carpathia, and especially to the Titanic in his clever new collection, Work, Neighbors, and Ship Disasters. Toss in the COVID pandemic lockdown, and you have the Hindenburg hovering menacingly over you. Along with the bloodless bureaucrats and histrionic students with their exaggerated claims of hardship, there are the neighbors, like the woman who goes on at length explaining the significance of her sleeve tattoo, while Muth does his best to pay attention. And yet this same cynic can always be counted on by elderly neighbors requiring assistance, nieces in need of comfort. This is truly a delightful collection of poems.

—Charles Rammelkamp, author, See What I Mean? and The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge

John Muth again brings us the wryly considered life, a view from a tongue-in-cheek 21st Century Thoreau. These are pleasantly bleak insights into the current state of the human psyche. His current volume gives us Academy and Domestic life in the context of the great historic shipwrecks (a rewarding comparison that seems only slightly hyperbolic). We sail with him around bureaucratic shoals and the shark-infested waters of the contemporary neighborhood. I hear the honest plaint of befuddled, bemused humanity in these reassuring appraisals of the darkness of our times. And there are many hearty laughs in these vignettes of human folly to distract us while we consider mortality and life of Earth. I search in vain for the poet equal to John’s enjoyable portrait of the human condition. Here is a one-of-a-kind comic philosopher whose keen squint is superbly attuned to the scene he paints. More, please!

—John Browning