The Dangerous Book of Poetry For Planes
The Dangerous Book of Poetry For Planes
By Mark Yakich
Subversive, erotic, and sublime, The Dangerous Book of Poetry for Planes challenges the conventions of airplane reading. Family, faith, technology, celebrity—yes, they are here. But so too is sex as philanthropy, flight as weltschmerz, and grammar as the ultimate loneliness. In a world that often seems to have lost its affinity for wonder, Poetry for Planes reminds us that our greatest sense is our sense of wordplay.
The Dangerous Book of Poetry for Planes is both crystal clear and unfathomable—its voices are both as familiar as a next door neighbor’s voice and as alien as a next door neighbor’s life, and the comforts the poems offer are impossible comforts: “I look down and feel / Like a weed // A wind slips through.” Poetry for Planes speaks to the impossible world the world has become. – Shane McCrae
Delightfully inappropriate, The Dangerous Book of Poetry for Planes explores the self within the sealed silver petri dish of an airplane—a tin can full of camp. It is a setting that, by its very lack of gravity, defies logic, and Yakich fills it with white hot jizz, cold red blood, tears of grief and rage, irrational calmness, and a God that exists at once beyond and within us. – Jennifer L. Knox
In The Dangerous Book of Poetry For Planes Mark Yakich keeps ungainly metal aloft with carefully tightened words. Following a formal progression from lyric rhymed couplets through concrete constructions and star-studded "blood chits" to ambient nonfiction, Yakich proves both his wit and his ferocity. – Heather Christle