Cover art: Detail, She-Wolf with Romulus and Remus, mosaic, approximately
300-400 AD, courtesy Leeds City Museum
Clay Ventre’s Excellent Wildlife Photos, is a catalog of masterful snapshots of Stage 4 ennui, artificial grandmothers, catastrophic maidens, lost sock puppets, loose cucumbers, and a couple of sad undead Babylonians in places like the 53rd annual Alberto Giacometti appreciation luncheon in Lubbock, Texas. These poems partake of the manic invention of Gregory Corso, the mutability of Russell Edson’s parables, and Kenneth Patchen’s refracted address to the beloved, with all this repartee captured with Platonic precision in a Cubist police report. This book is like getting whacked upside the head deliciously with a Klein bottle filled with impossible wine. Drink up!
– Simeon Berry, two-time winner of The National Poetry Series for AmpersandRevisited and Monograph
Clay Ventre’s Excellent Wildlife Photos offers us a contemporary manifesto and a choose your own adventure, all with a wild wonder that never calcifies, where the heart is a very, very, stubborn beacon. Even a reluctant love poem cannot be faked when two lovers realize “the weather / inside them was the same.” Or there’s the poem titled “Everything Exits” that I read as “Everything Exists” because lifeforce is the medium of Ventre’s work – indeed, this is a brilliant meditation on “devouring / plate by plate / a lifetime.”
– Hannah Larrabee, author of The Observable Universe and Wonder Tissue
The Art of Thinking on Earth at 3:13AM
It’ll only bother you
if you think about it— She had told him
when asked about the dinner she would be
eating on Mars with
the previous owner
of her iron heart—
now—with her enjoying 0.375 gravity
and him without a
spaceship
he let his mind wander a museum of possibilities until he found himself in its unlit cellar
—at night
with an unseen hand
guiding him in circles
like a clueless lion arcing around a hunter who
at this distance
couldn’t miss
Clay Ventre lives and writes in New England.
