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Review by Timothy Gager

There’s something wrong with you if these poems don’t speak to you. If they don’t speak to you it means you are not vulnerable. It means you are uncomfortable when someone is completely honest with you. It means someone sitting next to you on an airplane who is about to tell you the most incredible story you’ve heard in your life and is silenced because you are too busy to listen.

Quit This Job And Become A Poet (Out of Spite)
By Georgia Park
October 2018
Free Verse Revolution Publishing

Truth is, you are not too busy, but you don’t want to listen to the person next to you in the airplane because you are too busy pretending to read the in-flight magazine. You’re an unlucky sap who flips pages about the Taquerias in Atlanta, that you will never eat or speak about. It’s too bad because you have passed on some real life.

Georgia Park’s poems will speak to you admire people who take social risks. If you think the world’s normal is your normal, and you know that your normal isn’t at all what society says is normal … but basically you don’t give a hoot. If you are that kind of creative, sensitive person, you will love Quit This Job And Become A Poet (Out of Spite).

In this book, the poet, Georgia Park, does a remarkable thing. Her poems expose the inner-editor she has in her head regarding the risks in life, yet seems to shut down the inner-editor having to do with the poetry. In other words, the work all hangs out. This is a gift that Park has which allows amazing lines or phrases to appear like magic out of nowhere.

I want someone as close as

family

to kiss my eyelids while I’m

sleeping

and make a cross on my chest

even if it’s just my little dog

slobbering

who still smells vaguely of

kimchi

(from the poem Helicopter Tail)

This talent also allows her to stick the closings of her poems like a gymnast ending an outstanding routine. Many of these poems close strongly.

In Quit This Job And Become A Poet (Out of Spite), Park writes her truth about being a poet, going to events, making a life of it. While doing this, she is naked within her work, with the attitude of “so what if I’m naked,” which is a necessary attitude and swagger of a poet announcing themselves into the tricky world of poetry and or poetry groups. Again and again, we are treated to these unblinking words, as if, we are forced into a staring contest and we, the reader, will be the one who end up blinking. Yet it is the poet who has blinked a few hundred times, but it’s too late, you have already lost the contest, the poet is braver that you are – but as a reader of poetry you are the winner. It is something to admire. In the poem Talk Show Host the reality of no longer working is reflected upon, with humor and desperation.

I am sleeping

far too often

I won’t go out

because I can’t

pay for me

and I can’t feign interest

any longer

unless you’re a

talk show host

or a future

employer

don’t bother

Certainly if Park quit her job to become a poet you certainly understand it, and understand how it can be out of spite. The working world can be such bullshit, but so can the poetry world, which offers other various challenges. The poem Molotov Cocktail rings true in this regard:

Molotov Cocktail

I haven’t heard back

from the guy who said

he’d make me famous

except to ask for a blowjob

of epic proportions

which I won’t give

and the texts

keep rolling in

I start to think

it’s not such a bad thing

if no one ever knows

who I am

I’m going to bury

my manuscript

in a garden

and see if I can grow

my own little

Molotov cocktails

it’s better than ending up

in the garbage

with the scrap metal

and home furnishings

of this life

I thought I could live

This book of poetry is a good read, one I enjoyed, and would recommend to poets, readers, and even those who might be stuck working out in the world as dogs being eaten by other dogs.