{"id":845,"date":"2023-06-02T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-02T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/wordpress\/greenblotter\/?p=845"},"modified":"2023-06-02T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-06-02T12:00:00","slug":"a-love-affair-with-pop-culture-review-of-amorak-hueys-boom-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/2023\/06\/02\/a-love-affair-with-pop-culture-review-of-amorak-hueys-boom-box\/","title":{"rendered":"A Love Affair with Pop Culture: Review of Amorak Huey\u2019s Boom Box"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

reviewed by Isaac Fox<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Poetry | Single-author collection. 84 Pages. Sundress Publications, 2019. Available here.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

Amorak Huey\u2019s 2019 poetry collection Boom Box<\/em> is a plunge into the tiny, tiny world of small-town Alabama in the 1980s. Immersed in crushing suburban expectations, hypermasculine posturing, rotting infrastructure, White rage, and a town full of churches, a young Huey comes of age, taking comfort in TV and rock-and-roll. Boom Box<\/em> doesn\u2019t give readers any respite from that timespan and that tiny town: the only body of water is the Cahaba River; the only people are judgmental, judged, trapped, sexually frustrated, and disenfranchised; and the only place is Trussville, Alabama.<\/span><\/p>\n

Boom Box<\/em> is split into two halves. The first focuses primarily on Huey\u2019s early childhood, his parents\u2019 divorce, and television. The second is more interested in his later teenage years, his early misadventures in finding love, and rock-and-roll as an expression of those feelings. Both halves are connected by a sense of alienation that is expressed perhaps most keenly in \u201cAll Weather Wants to Be Some Other Kind of Weather,\u201d which centers around a boy who may or may not be a young Huey referred to in the third person. \u201c[F]or the rest of his life,\u201d Huey writes, the boy \u201cwill pretend there was a time \/ when he was comfortable in his skin\u2013 \/ a season that was not about waiting \/ for the wind to change\u2013 \/ a moment unshaped by hunger.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Young Huey\u2019s life and slightly older Huey\u2019s life are also united by pop culture and the multitude of roles it played (and plays) for him. Again and again, he connects rock music and the big screen to his own life, most obviously in pieces like \u201cPortrait of My Father as Tatooine\u201d and \u201cSelf-Portrait as Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie<\/em>.\u201d Through these connections, he processes and expresses feelings that might feel difficult or impossible to face unmitigated. In \u201cPortrait of My Brother as Indiana Jones,\u201d for example, he makes sense of his brother\u2019s entire life story\u2014from childhood innocence, to the economic struggles of early adulthood, to cancer treatments\u2014by connecting it to the iconic Steven Spielberg character. Similarly, \u201cThe Existence of Han Solo Explains the Universe\u201d poses Han Solo\u2019s hedonistic cynicism as a rational (and tempting) response to a meaningless, hard world.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even as Huey uses storytelling as a method of processing and coping with difficult emotions, he critiques narrative, arguing that it fails to describe the unpredictability of life. \u201cOur faith \/ in storytelling is misplaced,\u201d he writes in \u201cHow Things Turned Out.\u201d When it comes to Han Solo, \u201cThe movie gets it all wrong \/ and the sequels are someone else\u2019s dreams\u2014 \/ there\u2019s a limit to how much truth we can stand.\u201d A Han Solo who changes\u2014a Han Solo who takes heroic action, has principles, and believes in anything remotely like a higher power\u2014is no longer Han Solo. The true<\/em> Han Solo, according to Huey, is the crotchety old man across the street, who has no one to love and lives entirely for himself in a rotting, foreclosed house. The simultaneous rationality and pathetic selfishness of that kind of life is too unpalatable to appear in a mass-marketed story, but all too real in Trussville.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his later teens, Huey uses rock-and-roll as an outlet for some very teenaged feelings: sexual frustration and anger at his constrained life and home. Pop culture also provides a narrow window to the outside world for him (further narrowed by the fact that all of this takes place in the pre-internet 1980s, when the world ran on word of mouth). And in the present, Huey seems to be processing these memories of his difficult coming of age in a similar way, albeit through a different medium and from the opposite side of the artistic process. Instead of listening to rock and roll, he\u2019s now writing poems.<\/span><\/p>\n

On a stylistic level, the lines and sentences in Boom Box<\/em> are relatively simple and straightforward. Huey\u2019s poems take on a variety of forms\u2014some in couplets, tercets, or quatrains, others in one long stanza, staggered lines, or even prose\u2014but no matter the form, the language is clear and often unadorned. However, despite this lack of linguistic glitter, Huey\u2019s sentences and phrases are effective and quietly beautiful. He uses line breaks, in particular, to stunning effect. In \u201cTo All the Boys Who Died Before Graduation\u201d\u2014a weighty poem highlighting the ephemerality and uncertainty of everything other than sex and death\u2014Huey repeatedly uses line and stanza breaks to create double meanings. \u201cWe were motherfucking immortal,\u201d he writes, \u201cand still<\/em> \/ we knew everything \/\/ would be ripped away.\u201d Similarly, another set of lines later in the poem read: \u201cand all we knew of love was enough \/ to rhyme lips and fingertips.\u201d This second set of lines highlights the disparity between teenage delusions and reality. Young Huey and his friends believed that they understood love, that their knowledge on the subject was \u201cenough\u201d; they now know that they may have understood lust, but any knowledge of love they had was superficial at best. These drastic double meanings complement the sense of alienation running through these poems: the jarring discomfort, the unpredictability, the lack of one true and singular meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

Huey consistently denies readers that one true and singular meaning, just as it\u2019s been denied to him. Almost every sentence in \u201cCrimes I Did Not Commit\u201d begins with some variation on \u201cI did not \u2026\u201d or \u201cI have never\u2026.\u201d These statements can be read as sincere denial, as something more dishonest or ironic creeping into the narrative voice, or as a blend of sincerity and insincerity. Many of the events the narrator \u201cdidn\u2019t\u201d do are events repeatedly described elsewhere in the collection. \u201cThere was no hurricane,\u201d he writes, contradicting the very first poem in the book. He later adds, \u201cI did not pretend \/ to find God because I did not believe \/ this would persuade a girl to touch me.\u201d Numerous poems in Boom Box<\/em> describe that exact chain of events happening. Whether you take these negative statements at face value, then, defines how you read the entire book.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNot everything \/ we read is telling that kind of truth,\u201d Huey writes. In Boom Box<\/em>, he certainly tells a kind of truth, whether it\u2019s the literal, factual kind or not. The truth he offers is the soul of a moment: one frustrated person, one frustrating place, and a love affair with pop culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amorak Huey has written five poetry collections (and co-written one more). His latest,\u00a0Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy<\/em>, came out in 2021.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Isaac Fox is a student at Lebanon Valley College, where he majors in English and creative writing. When he\u2019s not reading or writing something assigned, he\u2019s probably reading or writing something unassigned. His work has previously appeared in\u00a0Bending Genres, <\/em>Tiny Molecules<\/i>, and Fifty-Word Stories<\/em>, among other publications. You can find him on Twitter at @isaac_k_fox.<\/span><\/p><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

reviewed by Isaac Fox Amorak Huey\u2019s 2019 poetry collection Boom Box is a plunge into the tiny, tiny world of small-town Alabama in the 1980s. Immersed in crushing suburban expectations, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,15],"class_list":["post-845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-isaac-fox","tag-poetry-review","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/greenblotter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}