Taliban Beach Party

by Eric Howard

Overview

"As adept working with the sonnet and sestina as with loose-fitting lines, Howard produces poems of great immediacy that stir with emotional depth. . . . [His] vision of our post-9/11 culture is offbeat, yet 'wisdomtight.'"—David Trinidad

Eric Howard’s debut poetry collection reveals the secrets that bind office work to war, Gidget to the damned, the Bible to popular song, mythology to fact, and Los Angeles to Ovid. On a bicycle ride through heavy traffic, it versifies the last days of a failed pimp, gives a tarot reading to warplanes, and deciphers the hieroglyphics of lost empire.

Eric Howard is an LA-based poet and editor. His work has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Caveat Lector, Conduit, Gulf Stream Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Plainsong, The Sun, and in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933527895
Publisher:	Turtle Point Press
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Pages:	108
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

California-born poet Eric Howard has spent most of his life in Los Angeles. After receiving a degree in English at Pomona College, Eric worked as a substitute teacher while living in an illegally converted basement apartment in the neighborhood of Silver Lake. There, he wrote Sinner.

He later used his retirement money to buy a house and be the live-in landlord of a bunch of misfits. This included taking part in pranks and art projects put on by the Los Angeles Cacophony Society.

He also obtained a master’s degree in English from California State UniversityLos Angeles, studying formal poetry with Henri Coulette. This allowed him to bring his punk sensibility to verse. He is a frequent reader around Southern California, including at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. For almost two decades, he has worked as a magazine editor, which has informed his poetry about office life.

His book, Taliban Beach Party, addresses 9/11 and its aftermath in the context of Los Angeles history, beginning with satire but concluding with prophecy. The title poem describes a Cacophony event that took place at Dockweiler Beach in October 2001.

Table of Contents

Riding to the L.A. River Bike Path 1

El Camino 2

At the Top of Mount Hollywood Drive 3

Vaux Swifts 4

Territory 5

A Fool's Journey 6

To Sacks, a Costumer 7

Taliban Beach Party 9

Ode to Routine 12

Traveling Man 14

The Great Rumble 15

To the Terrace House 16

Drummer Girl's Kanji Books 19

Walking along Sunset Weighing Pieces of Plastic with My Drug Dealer's Pocket Scale 21

Hollywood Ride 23

Diesel 25

Apostrophe 26

To PTSD 27

Side Effects May Include 28

What Moses Looked Like 29

Moira at the Door 31

How a Flower Became a Stone 32

The Fates on Location 35

Redhead Venus 37

Not OK Cupid 39

To Fortuna 41

Mark 42

The Empress 43

The Death of My Great-Grandmother 44

White Trash Mouse 45

Blind Date 46

The Unicorn 47

Boy or Girl 48

Psychology Today 49

Venus Xtravaganza 50

Heart-Shaped Ring 51

Saint John 52

The Memory Road 53

Elegy for Mr. Outerspace 54

Elegy for Hunt 55

Cupid's Galaxies 57

Office Bacchus 58

Office Venus 59

The Law Office Fates 63

Office Cupid 64

Office Apollo 65

To the Sun 66

Clock 67

Buying a Blake Calendar 68

Our Story So Far 70

No 71

Office Cassandra 72

Office 9/11 73

Office Mars 74

Samuel Tells Saul 75

Warplane Tarot 76

Horapollo's Hieroglyphics 77

To Money 79

The Voices 80

Acknowledgments 91

Notes 93

Editorial Reviews

"In this wry portrait of contemporary southern California, we read of ordinary life smashed up against the window of lives outrageously lived and risked. Taliban Beach Party guides us through a gallery of characters such as Moira, the sex club’s ticket-taker; the surfer god Cupid; and Bacchus of the office. Howard’s various formal strategies liberate these figures from the margins and obscurities and give them feet with which to walk, voices with which to sing, and bodies with which to bang about and love."—Ed Skoog

"[L]ike William Carlos Williams, reincarnated as Johnny Depp, doing a gig as a tour guide for Dante." —Barbara Roether, Cultural Weekly

"Taliban Beach Party kicks Moon Doggie’s ass and shoots the metropolitan tube alternative. Your TV is on fire, planes fly into the fiber optics, and madmen are delivered into the poet’s hand, where justice unfolds across the page and Cassandra has your rainbow in her hair. This book is a shindig where the wise office geek gets his Gidget and inherits the Selectric Olympus of a forty-hour workweek, singing this is how it ends, this is how it begins."—S. A. Griffin

"Eric Howard is a mixmaster of language, spinning mashups of history, songs, biblical references, and allusions filtered through an outsider’s view of the world. Howard gives voice to those whose dreams have not yet come true, including Daddy Moses, Office Venus, the drummer from Waxie Snatch, as well as the men who drop the bombs. Although many of Howard’s poems make us laugh, they continue to detonate long after we have read them."—Terry Wolverton

From the Publisher