From the "black wood" in the first line [coff coff] to just before the mention of Charles Olson sixteen pages later Farid Matuk's Is It the King? is unstoppable, Immediate Orgy and Audit good. Memo to Austin: Olson's name alone is code for "send out a search party to find my penis." Do not do it.

It was forced, once, she said.
This was in the car as the freeway sank under us.
Until it became under a gun, twice, she said.
I drove us on to another appointment with the social security administration.
A smog of finches let go the telephone line
to scatter, I think, then flock and swoop as afterthoughts.
We were looking for a little more money for the month.
Where was it? And then it was for four years
as often as he liked.

-- from "On Entering My Mother's Bed"

Matuk has a completely natural and relaxed tone that allows him to shift subjects from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's sex life to mineral supplements to the Beatles to scenes of nature in trouble without anything like our ugly NY/beat/slam performativity, as if somebody flipped on the interesting switch in a Black Mountain poet. It is a goddam miracle.

There are only 341 copies of this thing in the first printing (mine came with an upside down cover), but it's not that it will soon be financially rewarding to possess it that I am jumping up and down like Jim Cramer doing his best Crazy Eddie. This chapbook (which gets better again after Olson vanishes, by the way, though the tension agony tenderness and who-gives-a-f*ck-oh-that's-right-I-do are more muted in the second half) cuts straight through to the main issues in American emotions the way only a very poets have in the last few years and no I'm not going to give you a list.

This book makes me so happy to have an itchy paypal finger, it reassures me that it's not completely crazy to want to read everything and anything, that the so-called surplus of new poetry and writers (hasn't poetry ALWAYS been a parody of the supply/demand curve?) is a problem only if you want it to be. I'm not going to get all Dave Marsh on Matuk, who needs that craziness, but I will say that Is It the King? is a good sign that, for now anyway, there is a future of poetry, there are poets of the future. You'll find them, they'll find you.