Blueprints for a Genocide

Rob Cook can be as unerring as a dream in fitting an image to the mood he wants to convey. His subconscious seems to be guiding him, but he is taking us through the real world and not a construct of fantasy. There is more than the title to make a reader nervous in Blueprints for a Genocide, although the simple insight in "We will be returned to the cubicles/that have been dug for us" must bring a glow of satisfaction as we find the modern workplace recognized! And in nature, in a world seeming to be spinning in reverse, there are "winds/at the velocity of mountains/drifting deeper inside a goshawk." Ever imaginative, the sequence unfolds with the language beautifully matching the adventurous vision of the poem. David Chorlton This poem, this leap, crawled out of a dime's sigh and washed up on the shores of our happy little dust bowls. If you can quiet your metabolism down to a "cigarette child groping/ through the salt storms/ and tenement blizzards" you will feel it too. But it won't be easy. Rob Cook has placed a startling and inspired text in the hedges of dead currency and saturated attention spans. He has snuck into the "opinion coliseums/ and anonymous mating fortresses..." searching for an "unsafe word." He's been listening to the ticking of ant hills where "silence is the new transgression..." If you haven't tried to do that, and won't try, you will be lost. And it will be your fault. John Goode