Mammal Pit - (Phoenix Poets) by Lloyd Wallace (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A strange, cacophonous, and contemplative long poem following a posthumous narrator making meaning of life and death.

Lloyd Wallace's book-length poem Mammal Pit uses the imaginative technologies of literature to try to say something true about being alive. Conceived as though spoken in a single, long breath by an ostensibly posthumous narrator, this soliloquy accrues fragments, images, impressions, jokes, and regrets as it progresses. The narrator recalls moments from his past life, running through the American South, crossing the long Ohio River into Pittsburgh, and zigzagging over to the oiled, silent hallways of the US Capitol, all while calling up and attempting to make sense of what it was to be alive in a human body surrounded by the heavy liquid of time. Studded with strange, exacting images--"Men dreaming of knives / In such excruciating detail / They wake up with paper cuts / Saliva wife"--Wallace's debut collection attempts to ask the questions poetry is made to answer: What do you do with death? What do you do when it's standing beside you? What can you do but hold its hand?

Wallace's humorous and morbid romp across America and across the boundaries of life and death whirls language away from expected patterns and forms. Committed to the question of what it means to die, Wallace faces its inevitability and the fact that we are all doing it as we speak.

Mammal Pit is the winner of the 2027 Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

Review Quotes

"An unbroken cascade of memory and desire, slapstick and outrage, remorse and wonder--presided over by the most ancient lyric attendants, death and the moon--Mammal Pit invokes classics of modern American poetry from Allen Ginsberg's Howl to Joe Brainard's I Remember. This is a Künstlerroman, a protest against extinction, a love poem, an absurdist's memory palace, and a book of reluctant prayer. Wallace makes an exuberant self-portrait from identity and non-identity, attaining to the elemental, the shamanic, and the metaphysical--laughing all the way home."

"In his debut book, Mammal Pit, a book-length lyric poem, Wallace meditates upon the insistence of death on this sublunary world. The meditation is revery upon the nature and presence of death. The poet offers his readers the quick-shifting illogic of a Dadaist, the splendid and obsessive image-making of a Surrealist, and a Confessional mode that reveals as much as it conceals, that gives then takes back, only to give again. As we follow the mutability of his thinking, Wallace is as funny as he is solemn. The speaker of this poem is particular and peculiar, an individual and an everyman. Like Whitman, he is a singular I who contains multitudes. As well, the poet contains and reveals to us the deep lonely distances we call America."