Stuck on the Yarrrrrr: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781773492025)

Stuck on the Yarrrrrr is a collection of visual and typographic poems by David Alpaugh, mixing shaped/concrete pieces with narrative, satirical, and ekphrastic texts. It ranges from childhood vignettes and workplace portraits to literary and philosophical send-ups, meditations on technology and media culture, and comic treatments of religion, mortality, and everyday life. Some poems adopt hybrid or prose-poem forms; others make page design part of the meaning-a broad, playful sampling of Alpaugh's wit, social observation, and formal play.

PRAISE FOR STUCK ON THE YARRRRRR:

Alpaugh's take on the world is at once profound, ironic, and deeply humorous. His poems take us on journeys where every path leads to a surprising destination. Childhood reminiscences about bikes and cowboys arrive at modern scams and active shooters; another exposes the absurdity of religious ritual through a child's innocent perspective. Weighty subjects like immortality are examined with wit in "Reading Frenzy" and "Walking the Plank." And when Alpaugh employs classic forms, they remain entirely in service to the poem-a literary tightrope walk few poets can manage.

-Edward Pandolfino, author of Birds of the Sierra Nevada

David Alpaugh is not a "professional poet." If you told him you wanted to be a poet, he'd probably advise you to get a real job-plumber, forklift driver, assassin. This new book has all the guile and nonchalance of an experienced assassin, with none of the liturgical languor one finds in the usual poetry reading-John Wick, not Tom Clancy. Consider this send-up of Wallace Stevens from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Rocket Scientist" "I was of three minds, / Like a rocket / In which there are three stages." Few literary saints escape his skewering: Dickinson, Williams, Frost, and dozens of others come in for his cadaverous attentions. Aging, death, and our calamitous political moment he takes in with humor and sarcasm. Augmented by whimsical AI-generated illustrations, his poems offer escape and that sturdiest of pleasures, respect for our own intelligence.

-Lee Rossi, author of Say Anything

It's hard to write funny, harder still to write funny while saying something profound. But with his shrewd wit and iconoclastic mind, David Alpaugh has mastered the art. From farts to cadaver dogs, rocket scientists to Iron Chefs to Barbie's playhouse, nothing escapes his scrutiny. He eyes life's absurdities even as he invites compassion for our human failings. Alpaugh's allusions deepen and enrich the poems while illustrations by ChatGPT's "artist in residence," AI, offer illuminating pauses for reflection. Everything herein belies the book's title: There's nothing stuck anywhere in this bracingly original work.

-Lynne Knight, author of The Language of Forgetting

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Alpaugh's first collection, Counterpoint, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press in 1994. He has published more than four hundred poems in journals from Able Muse to Poetry to Zyzzyva and appears in Heyday's California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia. His essays on "Po-Biz" in Poets & Writers, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rattle have been widely discussed. A finalist for poet laureate of California, he has taught at UC Berkeley Extension and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and writes a monthly "Favorite Poem" column for Scene4. His previous Word Galaxy Press books are Spooky Action at a Distance and Seeing the There There.