If there is such a thing as the fabulist prose poem, then Richard Garcia is the master of it. Still, we diminish the unpredictability of his imagination by comparing him to the usual fabulists—Cortazar, Borges, or Kafka. By now Garcia has mapped out his own strange territory. It’s a land where reality is pliable and facts of the imagination reign supreme, where Sappho morphs into Dale Evans, a dog becomes a psychiatrist and analyzes its master, and a gangster named Chickenhead resembles Christ. These sketches are both comic and terrifying, dreamlike yet clearly metaphors for our so-called real world. In Chickenhead, Garcia has fun with us, which means, of course, that he is deadly serious.
Read sample poems from the chapbook Chickenhead

Buy Chickenhead from Foothills Publishing

©2009 Katherine Williams