22 Skidoo / SubTractions by Michael Boughn

22 Skidoo takes as its playground the junkyard of Modernity. In a contemporary world which discards memory and experience along with last season’s shoes, any building over 25 years old, and millions of tons of last year’s computers and cell phones, these poems recycle archeologically recovered materials into a funny, lively exploration of the possibilities of creation in a world where the young think that what Duke Ellington made wasn’t really music.

If 22 Skidoo reclaims the junk of modern culture, finding for it new forms and arrangements, SubTractions kicks the props from under the elaborate illusion of completion that ironically locates a world without history. Beginning with Gilles Deleuze’s proposal that the only role for 1 in our contemporary experience is as -1, destabilizing whatever arrangements of thought that try to seize and secure the ground of their own composition, these poems move through the daily experience of kid’s soccer games, orchestra practice, karate lessons, and mushroom infestations, vandalizing the usual and leaving behind the shattered languages of its beautiful wreckage struggling toward speech.