Jim Goar

Whole Milk

$6

Effing Press

703 W 11th Street #2

Austin

Texas 78701

USA

Jim Goar has a tree sprouting from his penis. This to me seems like one of the most painful things that could ever happen to a young man. And I don’t think he’s using this image in the very beginning of his book as a way of alerting the reader of what is to come. Goar uses this line much like a fisherman uses his bait. He dangles it until the reader’s eyes pop open, which they will.

Whole Milk is a tiny book and I do mean tiny. It is not much larger than a pack of cigarettes and is compiled of four poems measuring a total of 40 pages with some beautiful, though somewhat scary illustrations by Josh Rios.

The poems are written in prose paragraphs and what I hear includes elements of Russell Edson, early James Tate via The Oblivion Ha-Ha and various elements of the traditional fairy tale. Goar takes the reader through a landscape not too different from one captured in a Tim Burton film:

Hill people now live in valleys.
Those by the ocean now live
in the desert. Everyone has moved to
their opposite location. (from The Red Faced Bird)

He puts the reader at the window of a character interacting with a Keystone drinking bird, a stubborn elephant, a trigger happy woman, and a horse that can be found in a Richard Nixon mask.

It is the playful, strange, and sometimes comical imagery that makes Whole Milk so enjoyable. Goar finds himself at his best when defining the surroundings of the environment:

I leave my eyes open and face the turned
off TV. Beside it is the front door. The
wind opens the door. A girl rides her bike
on the sidewalk. Two red leaves fall into
her basket. Her scarf has tassels and her
hat a red ball which follows behind. The
front wheel of her bike disengages and
rolls into the street. A red convertible hits
the tire. It bounces through my open door
and makes itself at home. (from The Elephant)

His tinkering with the odd makes for a new kind of fairy tale. A fairy tale that seems open to anything, with a vision of any possibility at any moment, even the possibility of sprouting a tree from one’s penis. Let’s hope this is only a fairy tale.


Noah Falck