Some Kind of Cheese Orgy – Linh Dinh, CHAX Press, 2009.
The excess so enjoyably secreting from the poems in this book seems to be a deliberate, buoyant critique of US culture and western capitalism. ‘Zoology’ observes the rage of male apes, a dissatisfying wife, consumption of morbid news. In ‘Pissed off Zombies’, the subheadings (‘Etc.’, ‘Demons, after all.’) break up stanzas of mildly varying length, but are given the same text treatment as the poem’s title so that it could also be a series of short, fat, individual blocks of text. The poems examine themselves, tease a potential of implosion. Dinh is a master of the line. As the reader zooms out, they may find the obscenity and flamboyance begins to overtake. But, for example, in ‘Double Double Portraits’, each line is given its space. ‘Have you been translated recently?/How long has it been since you’ve been translated?’. Is translation like STI checks? It’s not quite clear by the time you reach the end. Towards the end, the poems begin to pick apart Vietnamese phrases, variations of laughing and then of crying. One gets the sense that Linh Dinh is daring you to take him too seriously, that he’ll always be one step away from any definitive statement you make about his work.
This book trawls dirt, gluttony, desire, migrant labour. To say it is ‘amusing’ doesn’t quite cut it.
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Cool!
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