The mouse looked up at me and said "Fat chance."

The Zoo Club by James Tate
Rain Taxi Brainstorm Chapbook Series
[2011]


 I don't know why I forgot about James Tate but I did. I'm sorry. The dude's written like a thousand books, won like mad awards. Return to the City of White Donkeys was pretty much the sole launching point for untold horrific poetry attempts, and he would have been my teacher if the assholes at UMASS-Amherst had allowed me into their writing program on the strength of said horrific attempts. Multiple sources tell me he crushes whiskey with the best. Anyway, I have a review coming out soon at Rain Taxi and I was dicking around their site and came across their chapbook series, and The Zoo Club stood there on the screen, black, glaring at me. Whoa, I thought after purchasing it, wasn't James Tate important or something? I read it and remembered that yes, you idiot, he was and is and will be and you need to stop not remembering, and...oh yeah, the chapbook. I read it. It's really good. 22 prose poems along the lines of the ones in White Donkeys only shorter, punchier. To call Tate "experimental" or to tie him to any specific school or category is dumb because there's no one like him, and if anyone writes like him it's because they've read him. The poems in The Zoo Club often start simply, in a place we've been, a place Tate can describe with such enviable colloquial simplicity: "One night I got home early from work and decided to stop by the tavern on the way home." Don't be lulled by what you think is ho-hum. Reality shifts with each staccato pause. Happily skipping boys turn into lifeless and violently murdered dolls, a boy on the street convinces the narrator that his grandmother's corpse is an ostrich and she disappears in a cloud of white feathers, a trip to the store ends with the Grand Canyon appearing a few blocks away. Tate's logic is his own, often surreal, a place where you've been a hundred times but now anything can happen and you better be fucking ready. But it's also quiet, eerily reserved, and even if you can't quite fully articulate why something is so powerful, you understand that the power is always there, and it's disconcerting, an electric flickering of something you maybe don't want to think about: "'There are roads everywhere and none of them will get you out,' he said. 'But how did you get out?' I said. 'I never said I was in,' he said. 'I don't understand,' I said. 'Neither did I,' he said." There is no suspension of disbelief here because there is no disbelief. Get into Tate. He'll get into you. Join the club. Don't forget.