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The image depicts a strangely plastic, dusky landscape, over which a translucent silhouette of a spider-human hybrid sits looming. It sounds creepy, but it's not. It's pretty. Like the image, Farrell's poetry evokes a sense of dread, but against a backdrop of luminescence: "I can hardly move or breathe in this light / our shadows laugh [. . . ] meet me in the traumatic / smoke-lounge of night / let us consent to nearly nothing / the dry heaving stars". Caketrain, by the way, Farrell's publisher, puts out chapbooks that are exquisitely designed. (I've never wanted to hang a book on my wall until Caketrain).

Bird Any Damn Kind is Farrell's most recent chapbook. He is also the author of Blue-Collar Sun (alice blue books) and has been published extensively in both print and online journals including Alice Blue, Jubilat, Diagram, & Cannibal. The community of journals he is included in does suggest subscription to a certain style of writing. Journals like Jubilat and Diagram publish contemporary poetry that I would call neo-surrealism or impressionism. Farrell's chapbook is a finalist in Caketrain's chapbook contest, and came out alongside Ben Mirov's Ghost Machine, which is a series of minimalist poems that explore the "ghosthood" of modern grief. While Farrell's chapbook is not minimalist, he shares with Mirov a common sense of sublime alienation. These writers do not lament the paradoxical nature of modern life, which is both fragmented and intensely connected, but love the dissociated collage. Disparate ideas or images are juxtaposed not to convey anxiety, but to convey a sort of strange ecstasy.

In Bird Any Damn Kind, the luminescence of the human world thrown into natural and artificial settings blind the reader: "You, me, our awesome appliances. / I'd like to use that toothbrush, please, / the one with your face attached. / In the orchard of beloved green apples, there is the relinquishing of the city-body, city-self". These very lines were the instigator of my impulse-buy. I related to the feeling of huge alienation and the cut-up, cubist feeling of being in love. Farrell takes us into the "many woods of grief", where the moon is "divided into thirds", is "a love-triangle dipped in a flour bin". The rhythm of these poems is urgent, sick with arrhythmia. Farrell does not need fancy words or esoteric lingo to impress a reader. He reminds me of Larissa Szporluk in the dreamlike landscapes portrayed in his work, but he is more sympathetic and colloquial, less removed, closer to the dirt: "The stars are hemorrhaging forth women. / They are teaching us how to pain [ . . . ] The thighs of my faith are red like the backs of chickeneyes. I lick the flat soda of god" (45). These quotes illustrate what I was talking about earlier when I referred to what I call "dissociated collage". By connecting things that do not have any obvious kinship, he creates a dissociated state in the reader's mind, but the images and word choices themselves harmonize to create a consistent emotional landscape. The logic lies in emotional intuition rather than physical laws. His work is concerned with the modern landscape yet is saturated with pastoral imagery. The latter fact makes him unique among most contemporary poets. I might compare him to the mature Dean Young (surprising twists), mixed with some Brigit Pegeen Kelly (obsessive focus on a few objects of nature).

Birds feature throughout the chapbook, which comprises a mere 75 pages including dividers, yet this little collection took me over a week to finish. The slow pacing of my relationship with BADK was not due to difficulty or boredom but due to its richness. I kept reading and reading individual poems and series of poems because each piece is packed with layers of metaphor and meaning. They can seem obscure at first, but Farrell manages to convey messages quite clearly through a complex fugue of repeating images and motifs. There is a lot of poetry out there that exploits absurdity and surprising language that never really goes anywhere, but Farrell's poetic leaps follow a determined path. Among the most prominent themes are the illusory nature of memory, the projection of self and meaning in human interaction, and the osmosis between inner and outer environments. The birds of language, of "Throats and Chimes" seem to fly free, but only within a projected sky "until all, from below, theaters into one" (58).