12/10/12 Grand Mal: Dennis Mahagin's Poetry Collection on Amazon. "Hip, eclectic poetry for lovers of smart literature" Time to Expand Your Minds and Read Poetry

"This review is from: Grand Mal (Paperback)

This briskly paced but well-thought-out book of poetry offers a twisty ride to clever, challenge-seeking readers willing to get aboard. No slight chapbook, "Grand Mal" is a full-length, 120-page softcover book that includes 50 hip, eclectic poems, many of them good-sized, and all of them packed with allusions and references to music, movies, TV, art, celebrities, writers, pop culture, newsmakers, history, places (notably Portland and Seattle)--and (seriously) a lot more.

It would be helpful to come to this book as a reader who has some knowledge about a lot of stuff--being a bit of a dilettante might, in this case, work for you--even still, there may be things you'll want to Google. (I, for example, had to look up the familiar-sounding name "Marcellus Wallace," and I found out--oh, yeah!--he's the gangster played by Ving Rhames in the movie Pulp Fiction.) Mahagin's pretty quick, he keeps you on your toes, and some of his zingers might get past you, but, after having read the whole book twice, and some parts of it more than that, I decided not "getting" all of it was OK. There's a line in the poem "Layers & Layers of Meaning": "Sometimes you don't have to know what someone is saying to understand everything."

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http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Mal-Dennis-Mahagin/dp/1608640515