Drew Gardner

Sugar Pill

ISBN 1-928650-14-7
$11.00
70 pages

How can a placebo heal? Maybe the way a poem does--by some power of mind. And indeed, a sugar pill, empirically ineffectual (as poetry may be in the face of a world that's being destroyed), can have a very real curative power. In these poems, Drew Gardner responds to a planet whose metabolism [ecology] has gone haywire. He builds these forms as a move to protect, like 'specks of mind caught in amber', tadpoles, pollen, lemmings, fireflies, humans, gladioli, the whole panoply of the natural world. Reflective, furious, bewildered, and attentive, 'this assemblage of feelings' reveals a 'flammable curiosity' that releases in a percussive series of phenomenological fragments. It may indeed have some inexplicable medicinal power.

--Nada Gordon