LOTHARIO

Lust, wrath, and a decided lack of pride in self and society fuel these scabrous poems.

Blackhelm voices men edging toward middle age, aware of their failures but hoping for fulfillment, which they often seek in lurid sexual encounters—real or imagined, glorious or deflating. “Space Jizz” salivates over a jaunty, space-suited, zero-gravity “exploration / Of heavenly bodies like this one / Course charted, the main one / For planet Heranus”; “Porn Star” registers a limp, disappointing tryst with an adult-film actress; and the lewdly devout “Christ on the Stripper Pole” limns an exotic pole-dancer: “Three songs and she’ll be gone / Like the three days on the cross…For she stands in the place of all womankind.” Other tawdry, banal, or infuriating corners of human experience are also explored with blunt intensity: “The Real D.C.” paints a nightmarish vision of a Washington D.C. divided between a callous political overclass and “heartless heartland tourists / In their white-bred, blood red MAGA caps,” and the rageful “Unreturned Wave” warns the ill-mannered that “When I wave to you / Or say hi in the hallway / You’d best acknowledge me / Or say hi back / Lest I kick your fucking ass.” Blackhelm’s verse is vigorous, grungy, confessional, and confrontational, and revels in making highbrows slum with low: “He do the police in different voices / Extremely poor man’s T.S. Eliot / But way more sexual / Than that glasses-wearing, Catholic-converted geek….Ezra pounded him up the butthole / But I’m way better than Ezra.” There is caustic, satirical humor in these poems but sincerity, too, as they plumb the feverishly emotional—even religious—resonance of our sleaziest impulses, as in “BR Tragedy (in Two Parts),” a cri de coeur against breast-reduction surgery: “Jesus weeps for the slain / Mounds of flesh / That you sacrificed for nothing / Blasphemer / May your new body burn in self-immolation / When it no longer inspires my lust.” Love it or hate it, Blackhelm’s poetic sensibility commands attention.

Arresting poetry that finds profundity in the seedier recesses of the human heart.