isolated version of nexus

Joshua Martin’s cut-up/dada/absurdist poetry collection isolated version of nexus reads as if written by a speed-freak Ginsberg and like a Surrealist’s bad mescaline trip, a dictionary eaten and vomited onto the page—making for a sickly adjective-adverb-noun soup of high-strangeness, a brilliant and beautiful absurdity that slips in and out of its own logic following through the rest: Pillars of characteristic parallelograms led proverbs though talking balmy dislocations vocal incantations slurp wonder house Martin does an excellent job of transforming/chaos/into/gold, a Ulysses of verse which calls to mind the textual mutilation experiments of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. At times the poems on the page reconfigure and shift like a mechanical mosaic, refusing to be read in any sort of linearity, as is with the case of “Not more days of yonder string theory.” Such a poem bounces and burns any semblance of structure, partaking in a sort of Derridean deferment of any singular given meaning: interpretation becomes fast and loose, ones eyes bouncing from word to word and across the page like pinballs, making various and different connections that shift the understanding of the poem. Joshua Martin’s poetry is not static; it is a living, mutated beast that has escaped its creator like a Frankenstein’s monster of postmodernity, shambling among the optimistic ruins of an American/city. In “Arms to highlight dynamics,” Martin advises the reader to First consider idiosyncratic/articulation & then/sacrifice/novelty, and in such a poem, as in all the rest, Martin employs his own barbaric brand of LINGUISTIC/violence in his poetry; a Stygian swirl teeming with free association and constantly seekingcontradictionsinthought.