Alamo Theory

Josh Bell

Part cultural critique, part surreal saga, and funniest at its most distressed, Josh Bell’s new book interrogates poetry, and language itself, asking tough questions of identity, of masculinity, and of American culture and its outliers. “Have you attended a picnic / that didn’t end in tears?” Alamo Theory is a humorously and darkly imagined corridor of time, anchored by a series of provocations spoken by epic hero Vince Neil, the former frontman of Mötley Crüe. Bell’s poems embrace isolation amid the waste and wonder of the senses.

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ISBN: 9781556593994

Format: Paperback

Sci-Fi Violence

Would a true prophet use an electric
salamander as a tongue?
That’s what I thought. Last rainfall
in the new city, held here
until we ship the wounded home,
the enemy collecting like aberrant
cells across the river.
Like me, they are afraid a rainbow
will notice and destroy them. Like me,
they were born believing
their body parts didn’t
get fucked together right. Is it fate
we name? Is it countries? One enemy
in whom I planted sixteen seeds.
One enemy who attempted
to tongue-kiss my eyeholes, and two cakes
of arsenic tucked
beneath his armpits. Look
carefully around you, then return
your look to me. As with a small
percentage of my countrymen, I die if I sleep
in a horizontal position, sucky
little prostitute of muscle
in the chest. Pinned down
by guerrilla holdouts
in a rooftop dumpster, I think
of my imperial home,
of walking the orchard rows
with childhood friends, half of whom
I own, some of whom
have names. Each night, they’d tape me
upright to the wall, so that I could dream
safely in the vertical, as God
intended me to do. An elegy
is someone left alone, for hours,
in a room with a dead body. And there have always
been rules against that sort of thing.

About the Author

Josh Bell attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and a Paul Engle Postgraduate Fellow. His PhD is from the University of Cincinnati — where he held a Distinguished Graduate fellowship — and he was the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing. The author of a previous collection of poems, No Planets Strike, Bell is the recipient of an NEA grant, has been a member of the …

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Reviews

“This is a speaker who has seen too much, felt too much, who cannot bear much more, but who still believes in us, and in his job, enough to try to bring back an accurate report from the large and the small broken heart.” —Jorie Graham

“Josh sings as if he had both a feather and a pistol held to his throat—objects that somehow (so absurd and surreal is his world) merge into the same provocation.” —Calvin Bedient