North Africa

Thanks to James Gill @ The Common for including my poems this month.

@NewPages

Conquistador of the Useless

Fiction by Joshua Isard

Cinto Puntos Press, March 2013

ISBN-13: 978-1-935955-54-2

Paperback: 240pp; $16.95

Review by Michael Caylo-Baradi

Even if you were only half-awake in the late ’80s and early ’90s and only occasionally watched prime-time shows on ABC, you may remember the nostalgic narrator of The Wonder Years and the young urban professionals in thirtysomething, which sparked the now-commonplace term and later earned a place in the Oxford English Dictionary. Both shows were framed in the imagination of baby boomers, the Clinton-Gore age group back in 1992 whose childhood memories of Sixties counterculture now feels muted, ironed out into designer suits and body language that secure career paths and retirement plans. You might get a whiff of those two shows in Joshua Isard’s Conquistador of the Useless, through the tone of nostalgia for one’s teenage years that, to some extent, acts as an element of restraint and caution about being pulled too fast into an upwardly mobile career in information technology. The narratives of urban alienation in Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain, MTV’s Daria, and Kurt Vonnegut are not mere artifacts in Nathan Wavelsky’s suburban world, but serve as imaginary sticky notes for a life filled with statistical reports, deadlines, and board meetings. Thus, Nathan accepts a big job promotion with trepidation and, knowing the ball is in his court, requests a few months off for something unrelated to his career: his condition for accepting the offer is that he starts working in his new job after climbing Mt. Everest.

[ Read Full Text at NewPages. ]

2014

bending light is like looking for the mojave in hollywood

a motorcycle is lost in the ears of dog-eared diaries

i'm allergic to morning news with too much make-up

remember that time when we once were walls in caves

hollywood feels like smoke touching your eyes

consistency is the gun you never use on the freeway