Bitches Brew
July 2007

Cannibal Casserole
By Julia Vinograd
Zeitgeist Press (www.zeitgeist-press.com)
2006,  88 pages, $5

                                    “Imagine getting out of the tub
                                    and drying off with a Jack the Ripper towel
                                    while standing on Manson’s face.
                                    I must confess I like it.
                                    Imagine Jeffrey Dahmer magnets for the icebox.
                                    I’m only surprised it took this long.
                                    Our heroes have failed us.
                                    T.V. evangelists and politicians tell us to send money
                                    and it will be all right.
                                    But there isn’t enough money and it won’t.
                                    So we go to the jails, the madhouse,
                                    the serial killers who never compromise
                                    their own darkness.
                                    Asked the damned about God.
                                    They know.

-          From “Serial Killers”

Luckily for us, Berkeley’s poet laureate in perpetuity owns her darkness and never compromises her experience of it. 

Julia Vinograd’s poems, like Bukowski’s, are accessible yet cutting, nay biting, lyrical shots of flash fiction broken into stanzas.  That is, they are free to personify, free to engage in negative capability and (like Whitman) free to trip:

            “Boys who see Star Wars come out wanting to save the world
            but walk past appeals for AIDS
            and a drunken veteran in a wheelchair
            sparechanging. His pants leg hang empty.
            I can’t help him either but I can make him a star.
            In a galaxy far, far too near
            he was going to be married.
            She had red hair, freckles, no particular gift for silence
            and she couldn’t keep her hands off him.
            His phantom limbs itch with the weight of her body,
            There’s not enough drink in the world to make him forget.”

-          From “Star Wars”

There is not a single book Vinograd has written that is not worth reading.  In nearly every poem, in nearly every book, there are whole stanzas that could only be described as “gold.” They may not be the same for everyone, but generally there is a wit and tone that appeals across the board to classically afflicted and affected.

Cannibal Casserole is her nineteenth book with Zeitgeist press (impressive enough in itself) and is a gorgeous balance of newer poems, buffed by years of wizened crafting and selected gems from previous collections.

                                    “Two 9-year-olds loaded their toy guns
                                    with summer cherries
                                    and shot black red satin ripe at each other.
                                    The stains were purple not red but they agreed
                                    “close enough for government work.”
                                   
-          From “War”

The two stars of this collection of Vinograd’s (besides the old legless vet) are the city of Jerusalem and her eternal companion, War.  In between her poems which can be upbeat, wryly amusing and even inspirational (Remembering The Café Babar; The Jack Micheline Memorial and the eternally brilliant Breast Cancer Scare) she reminds us why she needs to seek out these lighter notes:

                        “’There is blood on the doorpost as always
                        for the Angel of Death to pass over’ Jerusalem continued
                        ‘but there is also blood on the street
                        and the last time I saw the Angel of Death
                        he’d gone blind.
                        Soft pearly cataracts covered the holes in his skull.
                         I asked him why but he only laughed.’
                       ‘Too many people confuse me with Justice these days’ he answered
                        and isn’t justice blind?’
                       Jerusalem sighed. ‘I just stood there,’ she whispered
                        in all my useless beauty.”

-          From “Passover in Jerusalem”

The accompanying sketches in the book of various human creatures that undoubtedly stalk Vinograd’s visions (and of course, her empire, Telegraph Ave in Berkeley) make for a chilling experience set near the various Jerusalem set pieces…as if little elegies for an old holy city might very well add up to one big elegy for the rest of us, and we’ve been showing the symptoms for some time now.  Julia Vinograd is just recording it for us to show the potential survivors that some of us were quite aware of the fact.

-Paul Corman-Roberts