Review by Daryl Rogers

Plain Old Boogie Long Division

Mark Weber is a bird, albeit a big one,a man who took part in staged fist fights when he was a teenager and expresses anguish over vacuuming up a bug in his latest collection of poems. Big Web is an Okie who wound up in Cucamonga, California, a guy that can get off on some aural, mathematical construct by Coltrane, Bird or Monk

and then cue up one of George Jones’ crying-in-your-beer

-honky-tonk masterpieces as if no gap existed between

the two. (All That Jazz, KUNM, Thursdays, 2:00 pm EST.)

This collection, of poems and prose pieces,

is a lot like that. Just look at his photo; the one in

the papaw hat, with hair hanging down like Don Van Vliet,

and picture him holding down a teaching position.

But the photo of Mark in his old pickup says something

else. He’s laughing, and his face is the face of a healthy,

humorous, warm, hospitable man ... a man that’s overcome a heroin addiction, alcoholism and spanked those monkeys till they laughed out loud. Plain Old Boogie Long Division is one crazy grab bag of stories, tempo experiments (ala Creeley by way of a Muddy Waters’ biography), and narrative poems that express a love of the commonplace common to Joyce, Hemingway, WCW, Gary Snyder and Merle Haggard. If you own a copy of Leaves of Grass, Kaddish,On the Road, Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits, or anything by Li Po or Robert Johnson, then do

yourself a favor and order this sunlit book of living poetry.

144pp, $12 ppd, from:

 Mark Weber

 725 Van Buren Place SE, 

Albuquerque, NM 87108