Blaze Vox Books, 2005

There is a strange and ambiguous phrase often referred to as a Chinese curse, but in truth an American creation given a Confucian back-story to add wisdom and gravity to the deeper rooting in irony from which the sentiment stems: “May you live in interesting times.” Geoffrey Gatza—without bothering to note its negative connotations or bastard origins—uses this curse as the epigraph to his poetry collection, I Wear a Figleaf Over My Penis, which is appropriate; nothing in Gatza’s world is as it seems. Buffalo’s own Gatza doesn’t write about interesting times; Gatza’s writing is interesting times. In this collection, comic titles such as “Our Lady of Perpetual Chicken McNuggets®” nestle next to opaque poetic statements such as “Truth languishes in jail, convicted of orchestrating/the murder of the daughter of time. Life is purring/over something that doesn’t want you, or your cow.” But Gatza does want your cow. And your “Mouse Deer.” And your “Quilted Giraffe.” And your “Mastodons of Macedonia.” But mainly, he wants to write about dragons and heroes and the ways mythology and meditation lose out to Wal-Mart, Starbucks and war all the time. Gatza’s poetry is in constant motion between politics and the politics of passivity; surrealism and flat-out absurdity; romantic parables and animal stories for twisted children—the “interesting times” are present everywhere, and they are always both positive and negative. In “The Cats of Baghdad,” when Gatza writes, “With the poor people of this earth, I want to share my fate” you believe the poet because he has proven himself to have shrapnel and flowers in his eyes. When he writes, “There is no such thing as free kittens” at the end of the same poem, you better believe that, too.