Book Review: Sham City by Evan Harrison
Evan Harrison
Omnidawn
Publishing, 2012. Poetry.
Review by Debrah
Lechner
Sham City is a metropolis of backwards, upside-down
and inside-out architecture and society. M. C. Escher would be perfectly at
home living there. Funny and fierce, there is nothing false in Harrison's
vision.
From “Cathedral”:
What
else is a cathedral?
Vertical
emphasis is an effective show of power; it makes people enjoy
the idea of a god in space.
It's
also a design for stacking all those families and quiet, banished
loners.
Sometimes
when they go to the store they just buy toilet paper and a
Suitcase of beer.
…
The
light coming through a rose window is almost like a noise that
resembles a phone conversation about
a third party's
imminent passing.
…
I
am thinking of the Soviet-era apartments in Warsaw,
of the volume inside and inside.
Harrison has a
keen eye and muscular wit that translates through his deliriously strange and
confrontive voice. From “Preview”:
The
report, issued tomorrow, will gore free association and
stink
of digging. The words demarcation, furthermore and course will
appear
multiple times without gesturing towards notions of languish.
The
report will continue to make me feel poorly about the way I
conduct
my life, but some adults may go buy a magnet or regard gut,
spectral
strains of words as gospel or serious business. We will
move
deliberately in our mirrors as if filmed, as if the report were a script,
safe,
lumbering in artificial recesses.
Hayden's Ferry Review published “Sham Life” and “Advice from a
Head,” two poems included in this collection, in issue 48. Sham City is the winner of the 2011 Omnidawn Chapbook Contest,
judged by Ben Lerner.