In The Miseries of Poetry Mr. Kent Johnson has married his ineptitudes, having already driven his other wives from one poetic excess to another. Ms. Papaditsas has obviously abandoned the vicar for Mr. Johnson. The vicar was lacking in vehemence. Now coupled with Mr. Johnson, even in her death, Ms. Papaditsas becomes the high-priestess of a modern and ethical cult. Even now, Mr. Johnson does not believe in aesthetics. In The Miseries of Poetry there are no manners with which we may be contemporary. Because there are no manners in the manner by which me meet with humiliation.

Never before have logos, eros, Mimnermos, and stinkos ever been so intimately entwined. Was their entwinement for the sole purpose of allowing us to witness them spin together down the plughole? We bear witness. In the kosmos, is there an utter lack of krisis just as there is an utter lack of judgment in this work? Ms. Papaditsas seems to have thought so and so she whispered these words, and Mr. Johnson was apparently around to listen. Never before have I ever felt so abducted and taken against my will as I have through Mr. Johnson's traductions of Papaditsas' writing. Never before have I heard an Orphic orifice so deeply in need of a good washing. It's about time.

Dryden said, "If by traduction came thy mind,/Our wonder is the less to find/A soul so charming from a stock so good." which describes the very antithesis of the present work. Papaditsas' words hearken back to the original sense of "traduce": to humiliate. You have humiliated me, Mr. Johnson, Ms. Papaditsas, whoever you are. Now humiliate me some more. Yes, right there. Ooh, yes.

The Miseries of Poetry is perhaps the only erga that I've ever witnessed as having such a thorough lack of theoria. It forces us to face the very limits of reason and then run for the WC. Humiliate me once again, please. Force me to bear this witness. The Miseries of Poetry may be the first work of poetry I've ever encountered that will avoid any classicist accolades while wholly indulging in a classicist idiom, with Greek words and Orphic communication and rough fucking and a fascination with feces and vomit. "Not all Oracles are kind" is what my own Oracle has told me. So at least two of three Oracles agree....

There is no doubt that Alexandra Papaditsas is a poet, but she is not a poet's poet. She is no one's poet. Or maybe just a poet's poet's poet. And Mr. Johnson, I suspect, is her lyre. Play on, Mr. Johnson, remain in arms against our pathetic rage for order. In rejecting poetry, in fucking poetry spitefully and in striking poetry dead, you and Ms. Papaditsas in your consummation have consummately revived it.

(The book should be released by Skanky Possum soon.)