New from Tinfish Press: MAGA, by Tim Dyke

Out in time for the second anniversary . . . see tinfishpress.com for details and a button to order by!

Timothy Dyke lives with parrots in Honolulu, Hawai’i. His chapbook, Awkward Hugger, and his prose poem collection, Atoms of Muses, were published by Tinfish Press.

MAGA
By Timothy Dyke • 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-7329286-1-9 • 60 pages; $15 (pre-pub for $13)
The official publication date will be January 20, 2019, the second anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. We hope to have at least as many sales as there were persons on the Mall in Washington, DC (by official count, or his).

Tim Dyke has a neighbor who loves Trump, and Tim Dyke tried to talk to him. The event did not end well. So he energetically sublimated his asexual gay male rage into this virtuosic and obsessive book, each of whose words begins with an M or an A or a G or an A, and in that order. Like a perverse and be-pompommed cheerleader, Dyke systematically unravels Trump’s slogan about making America great again, reveling over the course of dozens of pages in the poetic gift of a dangerous brand offered to him above the sullen brims of red caps. In this work, form destroys the original intended content with hilarious, angry angst. Who can ever regard the president again after reading hilariously honest lines like these:

Blurbs

Spiralling like an endless string of amino acids, unravelling the DNA of the dark heart of contemporary America, Timothy Dyke’s MAGA just might make protest poetry great again. By turns aggressive, sexy, outraged and outrageous, this is a howl from the shop floor where the nation is “manufacturing atrocity, genocide, amorality.” But rather than buckle under the horror of the presidential pestilence, Dyke decides to “make art; get angry.” We need this tonic. It burns going down, but it will fortify us in the long cold night.
— Stephen Collis

In  MAGA, Timothy Dyke achieves a procedural feat, unspooling the MAGA acronym into an unpredictable, raucous ride where realpolitik meets art on Alchemy Avenue in Alabama and where it’s possible to “Make / America Gyrate Again.” In a book thick with social criticism, Dyke spins language through the political rock tumbler and out pops a searing anthem against unremitting grift in an age of creeping authoritarianism. This is poetry that refuses to accept the status quo with all its Attorneys General, “masculinity addiction,” and ethical atrophy. This is a poetic plea for a refreshed ethical metric.
— Jules Boykoff

The poems in Timothy Dyke’s  MAGA  are tragically hilarious, measuredly intimate, addictive, and positively grim. Dyke is a poet-magician who repeatedly chips away at the acronym so skillfully you almost forget that it stood for anything.  MAGA  reminds me that art is our only hope or, at the very least, a hopeful departure.
— Jaimie Gusman

Excerpt

My ass gives attitude.
Maybe attitude goes
awry more as guys age.

Many axes give aggressive
men access. Go assault
my aging grandmother,

asshole. My air gets annexed.
Metaphor alert. Go away.
My angels got annulled.