Lotus Buffet

Like Jack Kerouac, Rupert Fike is mad to talk. A Rupert Fike poem isn't small talk though. Fike wants to be saved, wants to live. One of my favorites in this volume is "Toast." "In the name of all that's toast it must go," he writes, as he struggles to put the diode-eye out of a machine that, Cyclops-like, watches over our lives. Armed with hammer and nail, Fike is Everyman-Ulysses out for justice. But Fike also knows his limits. In the lovely last poem of this volume, the poet accepts a bi...