Mission Cleaners Books
from Logan's blog
"Yesterday while doing my taxes I received this text from John Sakkis, poet/translator/SPD backbone/friend. There may have been a tear shed upon reading it, but since there's no evidence of it, I'll never actually cop to it. Here's the text:
'Just read your Bug House in one sitting on my porch drinking beers on a warm winter Oakland day. I really love it, Log. A totally 'world building' poetry experience. I think you accomplished everything you set out to do--a sort of monologue, epistolary BOOK/ serial confession. I loved it and am moved deeply by it. You've written a book I'll be thinking about for a long time. Congratulations, Bug House is a beautiful, elegiac book of poems. I can't wait to read it again...A very very very good book. I didn't want it to end, but it ended perfectly when it did...devastating, perfect.'"
I think Logan may have excerpted from my text, that last bit there doesn't really seem to follow what preceded it. Or I could have been drinking beers on my balcony (not porch) and therefore not realized I was repeating myself. Bug House is quintessentially Logan, it's a grumpy goth morality play that manages to be weirdly fatalistic (apocalyptic) and optimistic (survival) at the same time. There is a Waiting For Godot quality to the book, I don't know, that kind of not knowing where we are, fumbling in the dark (literally in Bug House) for meaning, validation, and communication, it's a deeply erotic poem in that the characters all seem to be speaking around each other, not quite landing the point, surviving, punning, grasping toward each other (I'm reminded of Carla Harryman's Memory Play in that way, and not just because both utilize anthropomorphism), and yes, my sense of eroticism is a bit idiosyncratic in this case, but I can't think of a better term for it. Reading it made me uneasy, like that feeling you get when you have to pee (not the beers), but hold it just to see how much longer you can stand it. Yes, Logan's book turned me on, there is an anxiety that he gets just right, that felt honest. I would love to see Bug House made into an animated feature in the style of Charlotte's Web.
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