be/ond seh flinges

With some sort of strange anxiety caused by the unknowable elements of the title of the book bugging my brain, I brave myself to go through the table of contents. Poems. OK. A relief. Then, my mind gets messy again following the massive endless list of the poem titles. It starts with 1.plums; 2.plopperly slashed; 3.astral viaduct frogret... ends with 128. WOODY BLIN BLEEDING (another casualty of the real). Just to go through all the titles makes me dizzy & unstable. Am I uncomfortable in this “crazyness”? Yes/“No” at the same time. How strangely fabulous it is to be able to have the oppositional feelings together as if embracing the long lost twin emotions you didn’t know you had! Poems presented here are like amalgams of Plus/Minus; Black/White; Music/Anti-Music; Sanity/Insanity; Fun/Disgust… all gelled into gems. Not just experimenting with the language for the experiments’ sake, but Jim & Steve are playing with the language as musicians play with notes & artists play with their métier & ideas. -Yuko Otomo