Jack Skelley’s Interstellar Theme Park Reviewed Compulsive Reader

Review
Written By Geoffrey Gatza

Reviewed by Shannon Vare Christine

Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing
by Jack Skelley
BlazeVOX
June 2022, Paperback, 204 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1609644116

The titular opening poem in Jack Skelley’s Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing, invites the reader to an avant-garde setting where the speaker proclaims prayer-like a listing of “I want” items to consider. This is a place where “Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd” could “levitate the Tomorrowland Terrace” or where “Fruity Pebbles vaccination bars, with stalactites nippling jelly babies” can both simultaneously coexist, alongside other punk aesthetic and pop culture artifacts. Skelley creates worlds in his poems that are immediately recognizable, while also somehow suspended in nostalgically futuristic places. Whether a poem is set in Disneyland, a cemetery, or a “Demon-Sized Planet,” the natural or reimagined vision of each setting looms large “colored bubbles making worlds multiply.”

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Geoffrey Gatza

Bio Note: Geoffrey Gatza is the author of the poetry collections The House of Forgetting (2012), Apollo: A Conceptual Poem (2014), and A Dog Lost in the Brick City of Outlawed Trees (2018).

 

Divya Victor, in an article for poetryfoundation.org, said of Apollo: A Conceptual Poem “The diversity of these works echoes the complexities of the subject, but together they posit something specific, the heightened relationship between the interior self and the exterior world.”

 

Gatza’s poems have been published in anthologies, as well as magazines and journals including Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, The Pickled Body, Peach Mag, Tupelo Quarterly and various others. His play on Marcel Duchamp was staged in an art installation in Philadelphia and performed in NYC.

 

Gatza is an award-winning editor, publisher and poet. He is the driving force behind BlazeVOX, an independent press located in Buffalo, NY, specializing in innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Geoffrey Gatza is lives in Kenmore, NY.

editor@blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org
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