Steven Karl

Dork Swagger Steven Karl

Poetry. DORK SWAGGER is like that time I was wearing men's pants and met Mike Watt. Or when I had sex on the lawn across the street from a yardsale. It always feels good before it doesn't. Friends, this book could be your life. Your problems that aren't important, and the anthem still pouring from your parents' uncorked garage door. It is not just that Karl's debut is damning smart. It is. But that is not what will make you ride shotgun to his pages again and again. It is his tender mocking candid makeshift of weird wit staring back at you in the wing mirror. Poetry that both spanks and toasts that teenaged geezer in all of us.--Kim Gek Lin Short

DORK SWAGGER is a new secret for getting through to the world. It's colloquial, spiky, fleet-footed, smooth: 'A handbook on how to be a man.' And while Steven Karl makes you believe that he's 'at the place where I will set great fires & watch things burn, ' it's not only the end of the (man's) world, but a beginning. Because these fires have a sweetness inside them, like being at a beach bonfire with a bunch of friends--over the boombox and the laughing and the sparks you can hear the waves slide in.'--Mark Bibbins

If 'I hope I die before I get old' were a genre of poetry, Steven Karl would be a prophet. Youthsploitation memory lab, DORK SWAGGER pimps and elegizes the thrilled/bored experience of being young, loving and suffering. These poems go out to go in, offering cultures of outwardness--music, skating, freestyling--while combining recklessness and rebellion with humility, grief and insight. None of us became what we thought we'd become... Still we grew into exactly who we are. Karl's poems swagger in the center of bring-it-on people who, when they age or change or start liking different things, hunch a bit with the fear of selling out. Only a poet like Steven Karl could give you the party and the morning after, years after, all at the same time, all complicated, all deserving, all beautifully transformed. DORK SWAGGER is about a time as well as being a time. Turn on some basketball, spotify Joy Division, and read this book.--Farrah Field