Partyknife is a debut book of angry, funny, sad poems from the banal seeming yet hyper-mysterious Sink Review and Immaculate Disciples Press founder Dan Magers.
The poems range from gleeful haywire to broken despair. Stoner wisdom and vulnerable transcendence alternate throughout as the speaker drinks vitality from life and longs to hold onto his identity and a band called Partyknife, a band he may or may never have been a part of. Partyknife is not a memoir, but stands as the last will and testament of the poet’s 20s living in Brooklyn, New York.
Magers scribes as if poet-ghost adrift thru dressing rooms backstage taking notes, capturing the moment in all its lovely eros and happiness and cause for alarm. Writing poems like these is just as good as starting a band when poems like songs flood the brain. I like your smile.
—Thurston Moore
“I wanted to be high, but now I’m trapped in my life.” Frustrated by the limits of his world, Partyknife’s youthful speaker wears a mask of aloofness that incompletely conceals his yearning. His poems strain to hold his exuberance, and his studied detachment belies his racing heart. “Everything I hated has become my life now. By which I mean how happy I am.” These poems are angry, insistent, and wildly in love with life.
—Sarah Manguso
Partyknife is fucking awesome, like a manual to a new kind of LCD machine you aren’t allowed to actually turn on yet; the book is I think really an opening of something. Just thought, “the future.”
Dan Magers is co-founder and co-editor of Sink Review, an online poetry journal as well as founder and editor of Immaculate Disciples Press, a handmade chapbook press focused on poetry and visual arts collaborations. He grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
