This is a strangely powerful work, horrific and unflinching. Made up of prose poems that work with a fast-moving rhythm built on jazz riffs, scat, and the blues, the collection races along with explorations of race, poverty, and hatred. Especially powerful are the threads which engage with legacies of hatred and the breeding of hatred, societally and familially--these same poems are the hardest to take, and the darkest, but probably the most powerful as well as they look to what makes othering such a constant factor in American society.

There's no doubt that this is a difficult collection to take---its engagement with hatred, violence, and ill-used religion and love forces readers to acknowledge realities which are both ugly and provoking. It's a provocative work, however, and one which works gracefully to comment on a society that often seems much cleaner and progressive than many individuals could attest to.

Certainly, I wouldn't recommend this for young readers. But, for readers of prose poetry and readers capable of seeing the darkest side of realities in literature, crudely and unflinchingly represented, Fort's representations and explorations are worth reading. It's a book to think on, and one which deserves acknowledgement as a lyrical exploration of legacies of hatred, and thus hopes of breaking those same legacies. ( )

"This is a poem about what can happen between a
thought and a simple act between thoughts and
about the way a poem too becomes mad and the
writer simply chants between words and throws out
fire between words too warm in the throat and too
white for the eyes and this too becomes a poem
about what can happen to a poem between a thought
and a single word we call mad"
--Charles Fort, excerpt "Poem for the Mad" ( )