Baby Got Books

Prose. Poems. A Novel.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s ode to chapbooks, Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A Novel. began life as three separate, but related, chapbooks. Iredell is a local author and is a professor of English here in Atlanta. He’s also the host of the Solar Anus Reading series, which I just found out has its own Facebook group. After one of these readings, I tagged along for a few beers with Iredell and other men of letters. It may have been the beers, but I remember these guys as being among the most brilliant book talking dudes I’ve ever heard talking about books. It was a little intimidating. When I found out Iredell had a new book out, I had to pick it up just to see what would end up on the page.

Prose. Poems. A Novel. is a series of – wait for it – prose poems that, taken together, constitute a novel of sorts. Each prose poem is a page or two at the most. The poems construct a narrative arc of a man’s journey from the west to the east. It is divided into three sections (Books I-III), Before I Moved To Nevada, When I Moved to Nevada, and When I Moved to Atlanta. The book is beautifully designed. The book contains spare illustrations by Christy Call that blend well with the text without drawing attention away. The cover is designed to look aged and worn, as though it has made the trip with our narrator.

The prose poems, brief snippets of scenes really, tell the story of man’s often journey from high school to adulthood. The journey is fueled by booze and drugs and often descends into chaos. Our narrator struggles between the competing forces of what appears to be a downward spiraling trajectory and the desire to impose some order to his life. It’s a constant battle, and one that he often appears to not realize that he’s engaged in fighting.

Prose. Poems. A Novel reads like a novel in which everything that was not absolutely essential to the story or critical to understanding our narrator at his very core has been ruthlessly stripped away, leaving only vivid descriptions, glimpses of pivotal scenes in a life, and shards of memory. I’ve never read anything like it. Check it out.