Whole Milk by Jim Goar

Effing Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

   

Buy the Cow?

One of my favorite things about Jim Goar’s book is that I feel like I’m 50-feet tall when I’m reading it. Until my girlfriend walks in the room and asks, “Could you be reading a daintier book?”

But just hold it in one hand, flip pages with your thumb—you’ll be fine. “A tree sprouted from my penis,” will exclaim the first line of the strangest little book published in 2006, Goar’s 5¼” X 3¾” Whole Milk, a beautifully-designed series of small prose poems on unnumbered pages, published in 277 “collectible” copies and featuring unobtrusive section-splitting art by Josh Rios.

What made Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End great wasn’t just the fact that he was able to make tiny prose poems work where so many others had failed: the extent to which the poems were mysterious, alienating and precise—the most disarming yet engaging group of prose poems published to that point, perhaps ever.

More consciously arrogant and abrasive, Goar’s poems work in a way similar to Simic’s. Each line is a calculated punch, and nothing about the book—the use of art, the tiniest of prose poems—seem a contrived or desperate attempt. Goar dusts off surrealism and treats it with appropriate gravity. He’s also comfortable with the strengths and limitations of the prose poem in a way that so many others aren’t:

I open the refrigerator door. There is only one hot dog
left. I cut in two. It is filled with leaves. She says this
is common. When I hesitate, she eats both halves.

This is one poem in its entirety. Simic-like surrealism, in both its willingness to be forthright with the surreal, and the abruptness of its ending. Yet Goar has his own set of odd impulses to give in to, and he’s comfortable doing so. Nothing—not the talking bicycle tire, not the barbecued cloud, not the leaf-dog—seems out of place. The third section, “An Honest Woman,” ends with this two-sentence poem:

In parting she gives me her arm. This feels a bit dramatic,
so I hide it under my coat.

If ever plot enters, it is treated with defiance: this is, for example, the only book ever written in which a man cremates his dead horse, mixes the ashes with melted plastic, and makes a Frisbee that winds up stuck on the roof. Worth a read for that reason alone.

Naturally he doesn’t approach James Tate’s luminous insanity or Simic’s preposterous eloquence, but he does take an appropriate and capable seat in their office. It’s a charming little book, and at the very least, the tiny basement cult of Tate and Simic worshippers (I think the secret handshake involves a tattered and well-meaning stray puppy) should budget it among its necessary titles from 2006.

--Feb. 9, 2007