Jon Konrath

“Haiku in the Night” by Ben Ditmars is a collection of free form haiku. The title is a play on Sinatra's “Strangers in the Night”... A haiku in its self. This thin book on whose each page is a separate Haiku, is a really remarkable selection. I was unsure as to what I was getting into when I started it, having fears of bad limericks, but Mr. Ditmars delivers an astounding collection of poetry.

From the opening:

Stroll with me in green
Lively, lost, together
I am yours

Each Haiku after that is ready to stand on its own. I could't help but to share some with a close friend and the reaction is the same. These are amazing. I am really hesitant to give a five star rating to a to a collection of poems from a young poet, but these stand the test and I would happily intermix these haiku with Byron or Blake. Now I need to find a copy of Night Poems.

… (mere)

Jesus Christ, Konrath and I should never be in the same room together.

I think ultimately what makes this book so fucking good is not that it clearly ripped off all of my memories and crammed them into a short story collection. It is so good because Konrath knows how to take the irritations of just being alive and turn them into something that some might call Kafkaesque, but I won’t because I fear hipsters showing up and yelling at me for being so lame as to use the term. Nevertheless, Konrath has a keen eye for the details of mundane life and how they just absolutely suck. I recall Robert Crumb saying that he tended to blank out urban blight – like how electricity poles looked and the way urban streets were laid out – and he had to take pictures of such places and objects in order to reproduce them accurately in his drawings. Such things are visually unappealing but a drawing of a city street would be incomplete without them. Konrath is intimately familiar with blight – the eternal cosmic noise and pop culture references and memes and endless, almost Tarantino-esque conversations that make up the lives of the ordinary and often completely insane modern man. He finds a pathos where other writers might find ennui. He creates humor where others might find disaffected annoyance. To make the small indignities, random events and looming horrors of this life so very funny while maintaining a genuinely absurdist edge is its own genius. Konrath is, in his own unsettling way, a weird hero.

I cannot state emphatically enough how funny this book is. It was funny on a soul level, so specifically funny that it really did ring my paranoia bell until my increasingly diminishing common sense kicked in.

I say read this. Read it now. Now now now! Read and let me know what references Konrath stole from your brain. I cannot file a class action lawsuit on my own, you know.

Highly recommended.

You can read my entire discussion here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/sleep-has-no-master-by-jon-konrath-2/… (mere)