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Katie Degentesh. The Anger Scale. 2006.

Wow. I'm 0.1% done with the 9000 book project! I've been meaning to blog about Katie's book for a while. Probably better to do so now that novelty of flarf has warn off and it can be appreciated like any other book of poems. Funny and incisive, with the poetic personality of its author, not of the various sources from which it draws.

The titles are drawn from one of those pscychological tests, statements with which one can agree or disagree. The cover features tests filled out by Katie and Anselm Berrigan, Michael Gizzi, Julianna Spahr, and Carla Harryman. That's a clever concept. The type is Baskerville, and feels like about a 9 point. Hard on my post 40-year old eyes.

The prompts are all of the "I frequently feel angry at the world" type. it's another of those unitary books, like Cyrus's. Today for some reason I am mostly writing about poets I've personally met.

The drawback of this kind of poetry can be the overrealiance on easy laugh lines. I think here they are calibrated just about right. The page and a half length of the poems feels just about right too, allowing for enough variation of tone, but without being tedious. There's very little mean-spiritedness.

"I Loved My Father" is one of the best poems in the book.