by Steve Mueske
Ghost Road Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Nice Guys Finish Lightning Fast

Steve Mueske’s a guy who writes poems, that much is evident, but apart from that, there’s nothing really grounding his first book, A Mnemonic for Desire. Mueske (MFA Hamline University, featured in Best New Poets 2005) has fashioned a lengthy debut: 74 poems over 113 pages, covering a range of unrelated topics and broken into five arbitrary sections. Every poet has lesser poems, and unfortunately there’s the sense Mueske wanted to include everything here.

There are some nice bits of narrative and absurdity, as in “Three Angels, a Door, and the Moon,” a tongue-in-cheek creation story: “In the beginning an angel / carried an anvil out of heaven.” In another strong poem, “The Art of Measured Breathing,” the narrator reminisces about Jason, a friend who fell out of another friend’s moving truck, survived, and “struck a weightlifter’s pose.” A bit relieved, the reader soon learns the catalyst for the recollection: the same indestructible friend is stricken with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It becomes a cold look at how easily a close friend can be lost:

                           …Legs that once powered
a hi-hat and bass drum had withered
to birch saplings beneath a yellow blanket.

But smart moments like this are usually buried by the sloppier ones. “Why There is Always a Ball in Their Water Dish,” a description of two cats playing with each other, would have made great dialogue for Bob Saget on America’s Funniest Home Videos: “It’s Monday Night Football, / cat-style.” And “The Day the Funk Arrived” is frustrating; in an epigraph he cites below-average songwriter Ben Harper as an authority on funk, then embarks on a poem with lines like “The funk was passing through. / That’s right, the funk, motherfucker.” I guess “motherfucker” is supposed to give him street credit; really it shows a callous misunderstanding of funk itself. If he’s to write about funk, he should study those who do it (George Clinton) or those who write well about it (Thomas Sayers Ellis); otherwise, just leave the subject to Ellis, our best funk-poet.

Often it seems when he’s not working from a gimmicky pretense (a commercial voiceover: “For those who prefer / unaided dreams, we offer another service”), he’s trying too hard to be funny, sentimental, or smart. But gimmick poems aside, this book has some gems, and the fact that he admits to having been struck by lightning is at least inspiring enough to make you buy a lottery ticket.

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