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Parts Unknown: Wrestling, Gimmicks and Other Works

by Michael Holmes

Any collection of poetry that centres on a subject as atypical as professional wrestling risks alienating poetry’s core audience. In Parts Unknown, Michael Holmes opts to spread his wrestling expertise throughout each piece – answering the wish of every WWE geek but perhaps frustrating the average reader.

The language in Parts Unknown jolts and jabs and lifts the veil on the sport’s demons. The bulk of the book, titled “Battle Royal,” imagines the athletes’ lives away from the ring. For pro wrestling neophytes, the poetic hints are cryptic but colourful, as in the ode to Stone Cold Steve Austin, “A Man, Barely Alive”: “the metal in his knees singing a destroyed aria,/convincing him again, that in inertia/lay grace.”

For those intimate with wrestling’s soap opera personas, the character profiles provide sharp and stylish commentary. Holmes describes the monstrous Kane as “Uncle Fester with a runny pink eye chaser,” and pictures Trish Stratus’s York University knapsack “full of Miss Clairol and resolve,” rewriting “DNA for the locker room.”

Holmes combines his wrestling theme with an homage to a more literary grappler in “Socko’s Bök,” borrowing the central conceit from Christian Bök’s Eunoia: the wrestler Mick Foley’s renegade sock-puppet “mocks LOD’s old-school holds,” and eventually “folks lobby for Socko’s own book show: Cloth on Cloth.”

By bridging the gap between the lyrical and the blunt, Holmes successfully conveys wrestling’s blend of bravado and brutality. When the poems falter, the in-jokes and references fly over the heads of a mainstream poetry audience. Wrestling fans will love to read the grocery-list of finishing moves in the book’s final section, but will anyone else?

Parts Unknown carries the same caveat attached to pro wrestling: enter with caution, because the blood, sweat, and fears work well in small doses, but test your patience in hefty amounts.

 

Reviewer: David Silverberg

Publisher: Insomniac Press

DETAILS

Price: $11.95

Page Count: 104 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-894663-59-4

Released: Apr.

Issue Date: 2004-6

Categories: Poetry