I got this book in the mail today by Thomas Fink called After Taxes, published by Marsh Hawk Press. It's got a blurb by Eileen Tabios on the back, so that's one thing in its favor already. The second thing is that it was sent to me for free. It was sent to Kansas State University by mistake, and a kind gentleman in the Spanish Department there forwarded it to me. I am not at Kansas State (Manhattan, Kansas) but at the University of Kansas (Lawrence). I am not insulted by the mistake, I just want to receive what people send me. If you want to send me your brilliant books for review, even though I don't write reviews:

Jonathan Mayhew
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Kansas
1445 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence Kansas, 66045.

If I were to write a review of this book, which I haven't read yet in its completeness, I would point to a poem like "DRIBBLING CHASTITY":

offensive, soul's cruel
hairdo jeering
at the suit
you walk.

Through. To think
remedial roses
would goose his

gimpy frigidaire.
Crass skin, shirt

choler. Swollen

dimes, classrooms where
undercover iconoclast
sublime might jerk

off sluggish
bathrobe's decorative kidney.
Can a vase
smash rage?

I like everything about this poem--the feel for language, the sense of humor, the communicative drive, balanced by the realization that you don't have to explain everything. A rapid glance through some other poems in the book reveal similarly excellent flashes of briliance. Not everyone can do zaniness as well as Fink; it can easily turn into cuteness. (I'm guessing he's read some Elmslie at some point, another poet who's mastered that delicate balance.) So whoever had them send me the book, thank you. I'm still wondering whether a vase can smash rage...