Five Life-Affirming Poets Under 30
And you thought poetry was dead.
Poetry actually has a healthy immune system, smooth skin, and really good blood pressure. Poetry is *just* starting to figure out how to file its taxes. Poetry is still on the family plan, and its parents send boxes of cookies on the holidays.
Here are five poets under (or *verrry* recently and ever so slightly above, but come on) thirty who are doing alphabet-busting things. Their poems are like reps for your imagination. They remind you what language can do when you let it be — don’t bake it into a plot, don’t twist it up in sentences, and just use the raw stuff. And I know that sounds fluffy, and I know there’s a lot of bad poetry out there, and God knows it’s so easy to throw words together sometimes; but when it works, it works:
1. Michael Mlekoday, author of The Dead Eat Everything
“God drives around in his Lincoln Towncar, dragging the bumper just to shower the world in his sparks.” —Jesusland
When you’re uninspired, when you’re bored, when you’re questioning everything on a Tuesday night and trying to Google all the self-help blogs to find the answers: READ MICHAEL MLEKODAY. Or listen to him. Because, sure, you can “call it poetry if it makes you feel smarter,” but Mlekoday will show you what it really is. He writes about the Midwest, the woods, growing up, being dumb. He’s one of the only writers who can make me cry in a pause between two stanzas. And he can make me realize, so quickly, how much of my anxiety-ridden inner monologue is total bullshit. The first time I saw one of his videos, I started bawling at the one-minute mark and couldn’t stop, and that’s not an exaggeration. His book is even better, because you can read it to yourself, reread it, and send screencaps to anyone who needs some life. It’s so hard to give a compliment to a poet, but please insert some of my laughter and tears right here.
2. Bob Schofield, author of The Inevitable June
“every time you delete a passage of text it moves to Oregon and starts an organic bee farm.” —Tumblr
Schofield is living proof that you don’t just have to do one thing. He writes and draws — maybe at the same time, a pen in each hand — illustrating his poems with octopi and naked men. In The Inevitable June, Schofield describes each day in the month of June with a short bit of surrealist flash fiction. A not-quite-human narrator moves fluidly through time, space, and metaphor. You’ll be surprised by how seamlessly one image slides into the next. The book honestly felt like a moon bounce, if a moon bounce could be made of language instead of inflatable plastic. Which is to say it felt disorientingly good.
3. Chelsea Martin, author of Even Though I Don’t Miss You
“given that I was once a little girl who felt it was important to pretend to like rice cakes, I was basically designed to internalize my feelings until they became obsessions and the obsessions became part of who I was” —Even Though I Don’t Miss You
Chelsea Martin is an overthinker’s overthinker, which is maybe a much better way of saying “writer’s writer” (which is a horrible phrase and one I never really understood). Her inner monologue is robust and alive and metastasizing and beautiful and lots of other words that convey grandiosity and splendor. Start with McDonalds Is Impossible and end with Even Though I Don’t Miss You, a series of notes addressed to a former boyfriend, or an imaginary boyfriend who seems to be always somewhat sick. It’s a relationship under a very idiosyncratic and fucked up microscope. That is: it’s every relationship, in our heads, all the time.
4. John Mortara, author of Small Creatures / Wide Field
my heart is an unidentified failing object
there is not enough evidence to confirm or deny the existence of my heart
many people have claimed to see my heart
but it was only a weather balloon slash military test flight
—from “my heart is an alien spacecraft”
If you thought love poetry was just a Wordsworth-petting-angiosperm thing, rethink. Mortara’s love poems — and their unlove poems — are true as Wi-Fi. Small Creatures / Wide Field, Mortara’s book, is the first choose-your-own-adventure poem in the history of poetry and humanity and the Milky Way galaxy, probably. It’s a series of vignettes (flash fiction, prose, poetry) with forks in the road: Do you want to put your dooks up to fight the fuzzy monster, or run for your life? Depending on your choices, you’ll read pieces of a story about a woman named Jamie and her childhood and boyfriends. Overall, it’s a perfect blend of game and pathos — everything you secretly hoped R.L. Stine’s Choose Your Own Adventure spin-off would be but the spin-off never lived up to.
5. Marcus Wicker, author of Maybe The Saddest Thing
You have one of the longest
thickest, most veined, colossal
set of hands that I have ever seen
and, frankly, they cast a spell on me.—from “Love Letter to RuPaul”
Letters to Justin Bieber, Flavor Flav, RuPaul, Dave Chappelle, Justin Timberlake (“How did you learn to dance your way out of boxes?”), and Pam Grier. The hot poetic fanfiction you always wanted to write but never could, or never did. Here’s pop culture in verse, glitter and drag tucked into tight lines and clean paradoxes. All of American culture flashing through a two-line paradox. Wicker nails it when he writes about music, film, and the “holy streaming screen” of our laptoppy lives. In Maybe The Saddest Thing, you’ll find all of the above along with poems about growing up (“1998”) and race (“To a White Friend Who Wonders Why I Don’t Spend More Time Pontificating the N Word”). No fear here—just questions, and characters so vivid you want to speak to them yourself.
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