Book Review: ChemICKal Reactions

ChemICKal Reactions by Karen L. Newman (Naked snake Press, 2010)

This alphabetized compendium of poems (that take their titles from elements and compounds) reads like a periodical table of terror.  The imagery here is typically gruesome (my favorite: the abominable "snowmen" created when a hospital morgue's skinned corpses are doused with hydrogen peroxide at Christmastime) and the wit and worldview is carbon-dark throughout.  Brief in length and building toward zinger endings, the selections pack all the punch of a laboratory explosion.  To take two quick, illustrative examples from the 96-poem volume:

Oxygen

As emphysema ate her lungs,
Faye chain-smoked
while being constantly connected
to an oxygen tank.
Thin and bedridden,
she huffed and puffed
until she lit herself up,
forming a human cigarette
that left a long cylindrical ash,
a the flaming tank
torpedoed the house.


Polyvinyl Chloride

The street collapsed downtown,
a gaping hole swallowing cars
and breaking polyvinyl chloride
sewer pipes.  A gusher of shit
spewed over empty buildings
and flowed down cracked sidewalks
in a river of hairy stench.
The snowy-haired mayor
announced the successful movement
of the homeless out of downtown.


The contents are probably best taken in small doses rather than ingested in a single sitting, as the poems draw from a common set of themes (corporate malfeasance, environmental ruin, domestic ghoulishness) and strike similar notes of dire mishap and ironic comeuppance.  I have to admit, not every entry here worked for me, but the hits far outnumber the misses.  Newman proves two things in her latest collection: she is a veritable fountain of chemical information, and she knows how to dial up the "ick" factor.  Yet while disgust might be the most immediate response 
elicited, ChemICKal Reactions also succeeds in created a lingering sense of disquiet--as readers realize just how saturated with dangerous chemicals and debilitating drugs their daily lives are.