Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes

February 21, 2022
Delving into the deceptions of magic, photography, and fraud, Beer (The Octopus Game) does not exclude literary performance from the lies people tell themselves and others in her electric third collection. “Faking provenance/ is the hoax’s easiest gamble,” she writes. Her compendium of the camp, counterfeit, and grotesque—a surreal parade of Dolly Parton look-alikes (“Drag Day at Dollywood”), an imaginary meeting between Marlene Dietrich and David Bowie, a “two-headed taxidermied calf,” and other novelties—serves to conjure the multilayered self. Within this self are inner battles: “The Woman Who Smiles./ Step right up and observe her/ perfect imitation of a person/ who doesn’t want to die.” While it is up to the reader to decide what is true and what is false, the teller of imposter tales can’t drown out a voice that speaks from the heart, as in “The Poet who Does Not Believe in Ghosts,” which posits the finality of death as “God’s apology/ for suffering,” and “Thorn Ostinato,” a stunning litany: “O rose, the black wind shatters your face/ O rose the black wind shatters my face/ O rose show me how to die in all directions.” Readers are asked to look past first impressions in this imaginative and spirited collection.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
Beer fills her shape-shifting third book of poetry with forgeries and illusions as she portrays magicians, plagiarists, tricksters, and entire villages of liars. Beer populates the book's pages with a cavalcade of pleasantly deceptive voices, whether it's dozens of Dolly Parton impersonators in drag ("Thousands of pairs of Dolly lungs breathe in / gasoline and grease, breathe out glitter") or a poem written from the perspective of a falsified panda taxidermied from the parts of other animals ("I bear the bodies / of seventeen grizzlies on my back"). Elsewhere, a Q&A with all the questions redacted leaves only enigmatic and occasionally hilarious, swear-filled responses. A series called "The Stereoscopic Man" is composed in pinched columns of text that simulate a view of each poem from either eyeball. But Beer's playful embrace of such strange subject matter conceals darkly complicated speakers whose ultimate deceptions fool only themselves: "Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music." This clever, kaleidoscopic, and powerfully profound new collection will hopefully send readers to the poet's earlier work.

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