March 1, 2016
Another Archival Review: Jim Krusoe’s HOTEL DE DREAM (Los Angeles: Illuminati Press, 1991)
Jim Krusoe’s novels include GIRL FACTORY; TOWARD YOU; PARSIFAL; and the recently published THE SLEEP GARDEN, which I reviewed in my blog a couple weeks ago. Krusoe began his literary career as a poet, however, and published four full-length books of poetry between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. In the mid-1980s, he won a NEA fellowship in Creative Writing on the basis of a portfolio of poems. The books of poems were all published by small presses in Los Angeles (Bombshelter Press; Momentum Press; Little Caesar Press; and Illuminati Press). It’s hard to think of a quartet of books of poetry published in the final decades of the past century that was so resolutely ignored by critics north of San Luis Obispo and east of Riverside. Jimm Cushing, one of the founding members of Cahuenga Press, was fortunate enough to get a review published in the LA Reader that included an extended commentary on Krusoe’s poetry, but there is precious little besides that. I recently found in my archives a review I wrote of Krusoe’s poems, which never got published anywhere, and in the interest of adding to the thin sheaf of commentary on the poetry of a major American novelist, I am making it available in my blog.
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