The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

January 17, 2011
Terse, at times horrifying, and hard to forget, Flynn's third collection of poems—the first since his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004) made him something of a celebrity—tackles topics familiar from the last decade's news: the captain of the title, who appears in the longest poems, is at once an absent, wicked, or unanswering God, a vague father, a political authority, and a military leader in a place much like Abu Ghraib. "Capt'n, we can do as we wish, we can do/ as we wish with the body// but we cannot leave marks"; "one drop hangs on the prisoner's tongue—capt'n// are we allowed to force him to swallow?" Torture, imprisonment, and arduous military service are leitmotifs, or metaphors, in most of the volume's poems, and a wartime, warlike, post-9/11 America forms their backdrop: "the tower towers above us/ now, we can see it/ from wherever." Flynn's political anger does nothing to diminish his raggedly individual voice, and his shorter efforts include what sound like dissonant wartime love poems: "First thing we should do/ if we see each other again is to make/ a cage of our bodies—inside we can place/ whatever still shines."

Starred review from February 1, 2011

In his third collection (after Some Ether), poet and memoirist Flynn succeeds at the nearly impossible task of writing political poetry about current events. In homage to Walt Whitman, another wartime poet, many poems address an unseen captain, "capt'n this morning six were found hanging/ in a room made completely of air." The poems are many-layered: themes of air, water, earth, and fire appear throughout the collection, as do specific lines. Flynn offers intriguing narratives, too: one tells of a latchkey boy who either sets his house or a young girl on fire after school one day. Or perhaps both: "the boy stood in the hot-hot room/ stammering I did stammering, I did stammering... /everything you say I did/ I did." In the series about Abu Ghraib, the writing becomes disconnected and occasionally difficult to follow: "My eyesight is years/ See up yes did this." But voice remains paramount and compelling as in this love poem: "let's hold each other/ ceaselessly/ your bed a box cut out of the sky." VERDICT A finely crafted collection that gives testimony to moral outrage and celebrates being human; not to be missed. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/10.]--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2011
Poet and memoirist Flynn is an envoy from the dark side, reporting with care and veracity on the pain and mystery of suicide, addiction, and catastrophic family ruptures. In his second memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb (2010), Flynn chronicled his postAbu Ghraib work collecting the testimonies of Iraqi men who were unjustly detained and tortured. In his first poetry collection since Blind Huber (2002), he considers the quandary of soldiers trained never to question authority and the profound betrayal of trust encoded in orders to commit torture. His masterfully concise poems deploy lulling meter, evocative images, and shocking disclosures. The figure of the captain becomes one not of leadership and integrity but, rather, madness and terror. In the face of sanctioned abomination, Flynn seeks the elemental, writing with piercing vision of how fire, air, earth, and water are weaponized in a bleak hell of cages, boards, hoods, leashes, and cameras. Each word is a lit match, a thrown stone, a howling blast, a choking torrent. Flynn has forged daringly intimate and clarion poems of conscience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)