Inventory is a sprawling, motley, passionate collection edited by New York poet David Shapiro, some thirty-five years' worth of poems from street-kid-turned-surrealist-New York School poet, Frank Lima.

Scattered Vignettes, the sixteen page autobigraphical new poem that opens the book is worth the ticket price all by itself. I have no space to convey the humor, tragedy, family romance and dissolution, incest, and sheer dark wackiness of this lineated saga, but here is its ending:

"My first arrest took place in junior high school: / a gun. / My second arrest: / a gun, etc. / I was in a club called / The Young Demons / We were into guns/ drugs and territory. / My life was rehabs, / Arrests and jails / Crabs / Syphilis / Hepatitis / And finally / The mad houses: / These were the walls of insomnia / Where Dante became incontinent and feeble, / Twirling his eighteen inch Asian penis; / Where God sat in an antique electric chair / Preaching the gospel of a heaven made of iron; / Where the doctors and lawyers / Burned their faces with lighted cigarettes; / Where human excrement was soap / And patients removed imaginary wires from their throats; / Where the clouds of heaven could be bought for a blow job."

The Book is hard to quote from; it's all gesture and motion, shades from the street feel at the beginning towards highly surreal New York School middle and end. This is the opening of the early poem "Abuela's Wake":

"Then her mouth flew open / like a fish sucking air / Jesus flipped with a greasy hook / I wanted to pop a cap on his plaster head // Abuela laid with her / naked / he blew his nose / his eyes / broken toys / while he sang her to sleep // I'll tie your cold finger with / ribbons for the wedding ringÐ / I sold your teeth when I was drunk / Negra Bird-Lips my heart your grave..."

Here, more loose and flip, the last two-thirds of "From 'Dracula to the Angels'":

"Mosquitos are accustomed to considering themselves / perfect / This year they will withdraw / With a mouthful of poets. / Poets are to mosquitos what cigarettes are to lung cancer: / There are too many poets and not enough mosquitos. / To the mosquitos it's a matter of survival: // 1.a poet sees an owl and he thinks of a woman's crotch— / 2.a mosquito sees a poet and he thinks of a woman's / crotch— // Poets and mosquitos have one thing in common— / They suck."

This last quote, as close as I can come to a snapshot overview, comes from the end of Lima's poem, "On Poetry":

"...The poet's instability makes him obediant / to a sheet of paper, and the slightest stir creates a small factory / like childbirth and human stupidity. Poetry is pinker / than nature, devestates every heart but owes itself nothing. / It does not require air and is not agile. The face of poetry / is an expressive cut of meat that gives a glimpse of truth."

Richard Silberg's most recent book is Totem Pole. He is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash, and teaches Writing and Appreciating Contemporary Poetry at UC Berkeley Extension. He hosts the Poetry Flash Reading Series at Cody's Books in Berkeley, CA.