noel sloboda :

a review of “shell games”

 

a poetry collection / sunnyoutside press / 2008 / fifty-six pages

‘Shell Games’ is poetry & theater, monologue & fluidity. & Noel Sloboda writes from the interior, typifying the way in which we often dramatize even the most mundane events in our lives.

 

From ‘Coming of Reunion’:

 

Filled with girls

                 I never had the nerve

to ask on dates

 

                                  most of my dreams

                 of high school seem

uncomfortably crowded

 

Mud Luscious was lucky enough to have a piece of prose / poetry from Noel Sloboda in issue four – a text aptly titled ‘Of Species’ – and even in the duration of this flash piece, the calm & relaxation of Sloboda’s writing was obvious. He writes in cool colors, washing words with temperance & ease.

 

From ‘Directionless’:

 

                                  Today I try             to write

                 wrongs I failed to imagine, to redo what

 

                                  I have undone, to figure out what

                 my empty spaces                    say before

 

I am finished.

 

& one of the more interesting aspects of this collection is the way in which multiple reads layer & affect the relationships of each poem to the next. Initially there is a sense of fighting, as if Sloboda is only searching out the everyday battles, the competitions of life. But in successive reads, it is apparent that ‘Shell Games’ is doing much more than fighting, is in fact focused on creating a calculated sketch of a life lived – carrying the reader from the naming of an unborn child through to the dusty, bowed shelves of collected existence.

 

From the title poem ‘Shell Games’:

 

Sealed in duct tape,

shell shards held

together for eight days;

then something escaped

from a chink

we didn’t see. You

buried the little guy

next morning

in a battered Keds box,

probably for the best.

You couldn’t have done

more even if he had

been your own.

 

If readers are looking for aggressive poetry, writing that throttles the brain or grapples with hands & muscles, Noel Sloboda’s ‘Shell Games’ is not the book for them. But if those readers are looking for a collection of writing that condenses & flows, a series of poems that forces the mind into the complex & often unexplored simplicity of true life, then this is absolutely the book of choice, the one to pick up, the one to read through again, again, again.

 

Buy it here.

 

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{ issue five