As promised...

A review in the The Rumpus! Excellent...and an evening at the North Mississippi Hill Country Festival, complete with a set by Model T Ford. And dancing. A lot of dancing. (And girls hula-hooping, which is apparently a form of dancing if you do it right.)


Here's a snippet from the review, which includes my favorite reading of "The Platypus Speaks" to date:

Readers of energetic, ornate, and enthused poetry—step forward. I’ve got your woman. Sandra Beasley’s newest collection of poems, I Was The Jukebox, can best be described as playful surreal. Her poems take on the forms of pocket-sized fantasies; in each of her finely tuned poems, she occupies herself with representing different experiential voices, and she succeeds (to a tremendous level) at creating fascinating slices of reality and interesting characters.

Beasley ‘speaks’ through the most unlikely of forms, including but not limited to: the sand, an eggplant, Osiris, and the world war. In her most audacious identity-assumption, Beasley speaks as the duckbilled platypus. “I’d like to point out there’s no other kind,” the speaker snidely begins. The creature comes off as a curmudgeon, certainly sexually frustrated, and ends by kindly telling Disney to piss off. “The Platypus Speaks” is most especially wonderful considering it is a tightly-bound and brilliant sestina, an elaborate structure that could, in less capable hands, come off as repetitive or commonplace. The poet balances attention to form with her experiments in voice, enticing without overwhelming the reader.

I'll drink to that; in fact, I already did.