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THE CHEAP SEATS

THE CHEAP SEATS

$12.95Price

ISBN: 978-0-9668612-0-4

Pub Date: Spring 1999

Pages: 88


By Scott Poole


In The Cheap Seats, Scott Poole creates an alternative universe out of the elements of our familiar one, but the stranger and more outrageous his world becomes, the more we recognize it as home. Is his art Cubist? Surrealist? Post-modern? It's all of these and more, including doses of both Lewis Carroll and classic American deadpan comedy. There's innocence here, and it's always foxy. His style, while projecting playfulness, acts as a series of surgical strikes, that precise. By means of a powerful creative will and endless inventiveness, Poole characteristically directs language, perception, and imagination where they are not accustomed to go. He works to rinse with a concentrated astringent our interface with ourselves and our world. The subject of one poem is what he calls a "happiness lamp"; the truth is this book is such a lamp—you turn it on by reading it.

—Philip Dacey


Here is a funny poet, a very funny poet . . . but also a very serious one 'who knows the power of everyday words.' From "The Friend Who Went Crazy" to "Now That I'm Done" you will enjoy every poem, every word.

—Carlos Reyes


    The Cheap Seats awakens us to the delightful power many of us have forgotten since childhood that we possess: the power of transforming prosaic objects and events into poetry . . . Poole's imagination is of the heart; he shows us how to spread a quiet, wry, and genuinely humble wonderment over the field of our vision. I love the poems in The Cheap Seats . . . I feel sure that those of you who think that poetry is not for you will change your minds when you read this book . . .

    —Pierre Delattre


    I love The Cheap Seats. . . many poems tuned me up, threaded the wind's needle, plied the multiple resonance simply, surprisingly, landed the mind and loosened the weight . . .

    —James Grabill


    Scott Poole is the author of three books of poetry, The Cheap Seats, Hiding from Salesmen, and The Sliding Glass Door. He is the house poet for Live Wire!, a weekly radio variety show on Oregon Public Broadcasting that airs throughout the Pacific Northwest and 35 stations across the U.S. He was the founding director of Wordstock, the Portland, Oregon, book festival. 

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