Summer of the Month Club

A collection by Johannes Göransson, a poem by Jeff Alessandrelli

Summer by Johannes Göransson, Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022

Written into and through the death of his infant daughter from a rare lung condition, Göransson’s elegy/revenge fantasy (to paraphrase his description of the book) captivated me like few collections I’ve read in the past year. Rhythmically undulating, impossibly posthumous, this ghost punishment fluctuates through unsteady preoccupations with money, language, the body (debt/inflation, poetry, the hole/whole). Lines drift between English and Swedish (Sweden being Göransson’s birthhome), demanding the reader (at least the reader who does not know Swedish, such as myself) wallow in the in-betweens, negotiate the borderless borders between realms. Angels infiltrate. Flies buzz spines. Interlingual holes puncture the poem and steal our breath. It is all one language. “The World,” the long poem that closes the collection, left me gasping, gaping: as a father who has carried my own infant daughter on the cusp of DKA-death into the machine-void of the hospital where splinted and plastic-tubed she lay motionless for days, Göransson’s gasoline-flamed depiction of losing his daughter carved fresh cavity into that emptiness. “I call the poem Daughter,” he writes, “then I call the hole in her lungs The World.” The absence that becomes everything. There is no poem. There is no patch.

Buy from Tarpaulin Sky

“Nothing of the Month Club,” by Jeff Alessandrelli, The Destroyer Vol. 5.1

Alessandrelli’s poem, quoted in full:

“Summer.

¹

We switched the colors in our town’s only traffic

²

light to blue, pink and purple.

³

Lo-card country-grade

⁴

acid.

⁵

A sun-soaked caramel apple

⁶

, festering

⁷

, steady the hour settles

⁸

on my coffin’s cover

⁹

. Loving freely and boring easily,

¹⁰

I changed my phone number

¹¹

to CALIFORNIA.

¹²

(The stupid screen’s still cracked, the screen’s always cracked.

¹³

) Death is the one and only law with no flaw.

¹⁴

Dust into dust. Don’t call me. Don’t

¹⁵

text.”

1. Death’s inexhaustible void

2. my hometown had no traffic lights, boasted a four-way stop, pizza parlor and Red Apple gas and convenience on opposing corners

3. the temporal glamour of unicorns cheeky and toxic like immortal art-scum lowlifes

4. degenerates

5. necromantic neuro-paradoxical pastel assemblages incompatible with the ramshackle horror-flick facade of a face sprouting counterfeit vegetation

6. at the white-ass county fair, gnawing the sweet brown crust from the apple’s skin, chucking the fruit in the trash

7. flies

8. an exaggeration of time undone, deformed, pluralized into a singularity

9. imagine if our coffin covers were like album covers, or book covers, splashy afterlife announcements, the artist’s expression, look who’s moving in. lovingly designed we’d never see it again

10. Hello Mr. Modern Condition

11. like Rosalía

12. in San Diego I wandered beaches watching the beautiful-bodied ripple muscle like they were a technology impervious to crashing. extinguished myself in sunset. collapsed into motor scooter. fucked a surfboard

13. the border dissolves: the screen that divides worlds splinters, cracks but maintains. leakage. Death infiltrates but is paralyzed; media wrecks Death’s agency, Death shoots round after round into media’s bulletproof glass. the screen a violence of everything at once and the refusal of everything. time, Death, summer

14. coming from somewhere behind me

15. the material future, the immaterial present, touch me yes but the text is sacrosanct, intrude upon my words for godsakes don’t