HOW’S EVERYTHING GOING? NOT GOOD
Jon-Michael Frank. Ohio Edit and Cuneiform Press, $21.95
paperback (98p) ISBN: 978069253193-852195
For
a book whose title could stand in for any given day of content on Google News,
Jon-Michael Frank’s collection of one-panel poem-drawings, How’s Everything
Going? Not Good, curiously and perhaps mercifully contains not a single
topical reference. Anything like a reflection on political or economic matters
has to be taken through inference, from the sly reverberations of these ragged,
inward-looking and uniquely affecting scrawls.
In
keeping with the drawing style, the accompanying text is direct and biting,
rarely more than a handful of words. As we might pick up from the early
drawings (i.e., image: spotty banana / text: THE ORGANIC THING TO DO IS DIE),
these pieces make use of big, basic motifs: death, water, the heart. Frank’s
simple but startling constructions return to these motifs over and over again,
as if gently insisting we look at the fundamentals of human existence on their
own terms rather than in idealized form.
To
what degree is one lying by constantly mustering, no matter the circumstances,
an upbeat answer to “How’s everything going?” If the same degree of
dishonesty—subtle, widespread, constant—is at work in the notion that life is
an “adventure,” with each human fully free and capable of manifesting success,
this book is notable for its ability to grasp (and effectively mock) our
collective wishful thinking. Frank aims his repertoire of often-hilarious jabs
at the artificiality with which culture attempts to pull away from nature.
As
in a personal favorite, illustrated at the bottom with only a few simple blades
of wild grasses, which reads:
SPRING IS THE SEASON OF
LIFE AND REBIRTH FULL
OF NATURAL POSSIBILITY
AND HOPE BUT WE
DID NOT HAVE ENOUGH FOOD
AND THE DIARRHEA DID
US IN
The
humor is often based on such ironic turns or bald cynicism. At its weakest, the
material can echo the pure silly of comedian Demetri Martin’s drawings, or
gesture toward morbidity in a way that recalls but is not as daring as the
single-panel horrors of Atticus Lish. However, on the strength of its many
successful pieces, HEG?NG establishes its own sort of wry bleakness,
taking a swipe at romanticism in ways that are surprising, spirited and fun.
Moreover, the thematic undercurrent of the book, which suggests a move toward a
more immediate and essential reality than our culture tends to encourage, is
heartfelt; it is not just a joke when Frank declares, over a (somewhat)
realistic drawing:
HERE IT IS
MY BEAUTIFUL
FUCKING
HEART
(February
2016)
Purchase
How’s Everything Going? Not Good HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Justin Maki is a poet and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. He studied
writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in Naropa University’s
Summer Writing Program, and spent four years teaching in public schools in
Osaka, Japan. He currently serves as an assistant managing editor for the
literary translation journal Asymptote and as a web editor for the
nonprofit Brooklyn Poets.
