Brutal Synecdoche

In Brutal Synecdoche, Mark Tursi transcends static genre markers of poetry and prose. Brutal Synecdoche moves through different registers; there are language oriented poems, narrative poems, comical poems, and lyrical poems. Tursi has the ability to write through these modes with confidence. Brutal Synecdoche has something for everyone.

‘I am here to hustle you,' writes Mark Tursi in his terrific second book, Brutal Synecdoche In his meditations on culture, identity, religion, language (which one cannot avoid any more than one can avoid piss in a swimming pool, according to the first poem of the book), Tursi writes in a very casual tone, but the imagery is incredibly intensive. The result is a kind of 'hustling': the poems not only tug the reader along, but are already hustling themselves, already at conflict. As in most of these poems, there is an obscene humor at work as well in this line—the slang connotations of 'hustling' have to do with seduction and prostitution. But these unresolved conflicts, such as the prominent one between the sacred and profane, become the key to Tursi's vision: 'But hell, who cares, we'll have a wild time later at the crematorium. Listening to the murmr and hust of dust to dust, ashes to ashes... Look there's God's grandeur...right underneath the lid of that coffin.' Perhaps Tursi is a great religious poet after all. No pervert. No visionary. — Johannes Göransson author of Haute Surveillance and entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate