Pulp by Robert L. Dean, Jr.

 

There’s pulp fiction: true crime, true confessions, true romance, and these are titles of poems is this wonderful collection titled Pulp. Magazines with these titles are meant to be lurid and lure the reader in to turning the pages. But the poet Robert Dean mixes in the supernatural of misplaced things and feelings, so his poems become exquisitely crafted page turners that is poetry at its finest.

 

What is pulp but something formless, perhaps beat to a pulp in some dark alley of the soul, but the pulp in Pulp is urgent to find form, a desire longing for its ultimate manifestation, for its object in order to express and contain the longing that is simultaneously the promise of resurrecting love and a drop by drop drowning in thirst for love.

 

Pulp is loss, in the closing line of the poem “True Romance”: dripping with the absence of you. The language of these poems is sharp, colorful, and electric as in “The Tear” . . .rivering my heart down the Rushmore of your cheek. This book is haunted by love or love refused and love lost.  Doors slam behind the person who is leaving and doors slam around the person who is left behind. All the entrances and exits are barricaded. The frustration morphs into violent imagery: The naked heart is a loaded gun. He continues in the poem “True Crime”:

 

. . . Words chamber there

like shells, like bullets, waiting for the ventricular shotgun pump,

the vagus nerve hammer-cock that will load them into

the barrel of the throat, explode them from the muzzle of

 

the mouth, . . . .

 

And yet there is hope in these wounds in the possibility of surviving the hurt and the healing to come. In Pulp, Robert Dean has written an intense, tough book and declares love to be unrequitted:

 

Only I go on forever, scratching. A cold, cold case. (True Detective)

–Walter Bargen, first Poet Laureate of Missouri, author of Pole Dancing in the Night Club of God.

 

Dean knows well the night and jazz and detective novels and ancient China, and Pulp showcases these disparate, but connected, sources—and a number more. Consummately intelligent (and witty), Dean wears his learning lightly, but gives us a short tour of the darkness (and light) in his skull—and also the depths of his large large heart.

–Kevin Rabas, More Than Words, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019

 

Robert Dean’s book Pulp inspires, confounds, and amuses. He shifts perspectives often as he considers Icarus’s mother and Bela Lugosi, for a few media stars. Dean’s contemporary mashup mixes unexpected debris of the 21st century and elevates it into compelling lyric. This is a fun book.

–Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-2009.