Review - Mitch Grabois - The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face.

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Book Review:

The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face by Mitchell Grabois

Do the poems in most contemporary literary journals give you a headache? Are you tired of not knowing what the heck they are talking about? Then The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face might be for you. Mitchell Grabois grabs his readers by the short hairs—his poetry is described by Robin Ouzman Hislop of Poetry Life & Times as “lucidly readable…delivered in a paced, snappy, even raunchy style, a mix of compassion with often hilarious black humor.”

Think Charles Bukowski meets Charles Bukowski. All kinds of stories make their way into these pages—stories about women, family, neighbors, random encounters, women—did I say women? As in the title poem:

     I kissed the woman who slices lunch meat

     at King Sooper’s

     She shoved smoked turkey at me

     leaned away

     and called: Next!

     I kissed my doctor

     I’d been wanting to do it

     since she first told me to stick out my tongue

     and complimented me on its smoothness

     and the elegance of my taste buds

     I kissed her and she asked

     On a scale of one to ten, how have you been feeling this week?

     I kissed her again

For me, Grabois is at his best when he lets his imagination run wild—which is often. In “One Universe Too Many” he writes:

     The alternative universe

     in which you’re not a colossal disappointment,

     where is it?

     It rode the Diphtheria Nebula

     slid into the Oppenheimer Black Hole and hid there,

     rested in perfect silence

     before disappearing

He doesn’t shy away from the big questions:

     What if my grandfather had not stopped in the Bronx

     and become a presser in the garment industry?

     What if he had continued west

     to become a bronc buster in Colorado?

Grabois covers a lot of ground—from an Animal Control Specialist who picks up the corpses of birds at a wind farm, to having car trouble at Walden Pond and getting help from a nun, to hiding overnight inside the Van Gogh museum in Arles and sleeping in the artist’s bed, to becoming a Dumpster diver at the behest of a landlady who drives a pink Cadillac.

One of my favorites is “The Moment Gone,” where he recounts a childhood memory of wandering off when he was two years old and sitting beside a swimming pool:

     A huge mass of possibilities began to coalesce

     and I felt certainty begin its approach

     an unprecedented feeling

     No one had yet asked me what I was going to be

     when I grew up

     a silly question for a two-year-old

     but I had a sense of the future looming…

     I sat patiently waiting for the answer…

     Then my mother

     whose approach I had not heard

     grabbed my arm

     and pulled me to my feet

     She knelt and hugged me fiercely

     You could have drowned, she cried

     You could have drowned

Pski’s Porch Publishing prides itself on promoting passionate, weird, unfashionable poetry, and The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face is a prime example—far, far away from the MFA poetry mill, and a breath of fresh air.

About the Poet:

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over 1,500 of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes, and was awarded the 2017 Booranga Writers’ Centre (Australia) Prize for Fiction.

Click here to purchase Mr. Kissy Face

Note - click here to view info on another book -  highly recommended by Rich Soos - Mitch's fabulously hilarious novel, Two-Headed Dog ($7).

Note 2 - click here to see another fabulous review of Mr Kissy Face in After The Pause.

About the Reviewer: www.cynthiaandersonpoet.com