Schism[2] Press drops Drew Kalbach's first collection, Spooky Plan.
Drew Kalbach’s Spooky Plan is spooky—an uncanny directive working in and out of time. The speaker operates the paradoxical technology of the lyric like a drone pilot, virtuosic and remote; immobilized, isolated, instrumentalized, and lethal. Meanwhile, the lyric lines toggle between literally ancient modes of address—graffiti transcribed from the walls of Pompeii—and the ultra-purposeful/ultra-random language of SPAM-bots. What is the strange—spooky—texture that knits up in the oscillation between these poles? Spooky action at a distance? The illusion of consciousness and intimacy that makes the universe, and the lyric, and the Internet function, while each is in fact a mass of dazzling, unparaphrasable relays? What wonders is the Sublime sitting on, somewhere over the paywall? Spooky Plan sez, “Drop down and get your worship on.†Bow down. Bow-wow.
– Joyelle McSweeney, author of Percussion Grenade
In his wonderful first book, Spooky Plan, Drew Kalbach manages to write short lyrics that are somehow incredibly punchy even as they pile up the refuse of centuries together with defecations, nocturnal emissions and other bodily fluids/media. “You are coming to blow me but not until later. I learned this while I was aliveâ€: time spasms and drags, while “the baby girls†“grind and booty shake†and “put me under.†The dance of this menacing, hilarious, sexy (in possible an illegal way) group provides if not a narrative then something like a volatile pattern to the otherwise formless excrement of the narrator’s “post-continuity†visions of the body and sexuality. With this book, Kalbach joins a growing group of younger poets – poets like Jennifer Tamayo, Trisha Low, Monica McLure – who are changing American poets with their irreverent lyricism, performativity and media obsessions: “goodbye giggling in the carwreckâ€!
– Johannes Göransson, author of Haute Surveillance
These are the dreams for the commercials in post-surveillance capitalism. Kalbach's poems are real guns, real volts, real gifts, and they're usually about how we live today—even as we're afraid to admit it. His poems are in community (ethereal and ethernet) while recovering isolation (in sickbeds and video games). His visions defer to an ethos, but it's a post-integrity kind, where the body's fallen into corporations and hostile takeovers and hostage situations, and the tremendous cost crushes thoughts into what you'd expect: flickering sadness, blinkered rage, but best—this roving curiosity for finding a better way to be electric and dead and still wanting one more try at the slots. You can't "glitch it back together," Kalbach has noted elsewhere. But the attempt is a funny, bracing instrument, and it's exquisite.
– Evan Bryson
