self-published, 2005 $5

Till Death Do Us Art is the follow-up to Robert Pomerhn’s first poetry book, Blest For This Poet Crest To Rest On My Chest, and it contains two dozen new poems written from 2003 up to the time of Hurricane Katrina last fall. “Rank Recipe,” written for the sufferers of this hurricane, is unforgiving of the Bush administration, who probably were still reading “My Pet Goat” when that tragedy went down.

Readers who were blown away by the rewrite of Andre Breton’s “Free Union” in Pomerhn’s first book (“Surrealist Expulsion from the Garden of Poetics”) will not be disappointed this time around; Till Death Do Us Art contains the surrealist acrostic “Surrealist Smorgasboard” that covers three centuries of surrealist history from A-Z in 26 lines.

Pomerhn never forgets these cultural workers who no longer walk among us: “Composite Sketch of Christ” is dedicated to the memory of Raseem Young, and he closes out the book with a touching tribute to his uncle, “Richard the Lion-Hearted,” who passed away unexpectedly last summer on the west coast.

Reading the book a second time is just as enjoyable, if not more so, than the first—the mad rhymes are so rapid-fire, the wordplay so quick, the typographical changes so pertinent, that you can’t assimilate it all on just one reading. The diesel fuel guzzling travesty known as the NFTA, the hypocrisy of the Buffalo poetry slam scene, the commercialization of the spiritual, the ubiquitous haters and poseurs who are everywhere, police harassment, drugs as a tool of mass zombiefication, and a hundred more topics break the speed limit across these pages.

I once told Pomerhn that he has a style so distinctive that when I would encounter one of his works in Artvoice or the Marymark Press or the Blue Collar Review, that I knew the poem was by him before I ever got to the writer’s name at the bottom of the page. And I don’t think you can pay a writer a higher compliment than that. Go to Talking Leaves or Rust Belt or wherever better books are sold, and get this book.