Hot Mud Poems

Hot Mud Poems
Alveraz Ricardez
Kill Poet Press
ISBN: 0-6151-3506-9
Poetry
Reviewed by Lee Gooden

With the eye of a film-maker and a bibliophile, the beneficial influences of poets and other film makers are apparent in Alveraz Ricardez’s book of poems Hot Mud Poems. Specifically poets like Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan, Charles Bukowski and former poet Laureate, Billy Collins and film makers like Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, John Cassavetes, Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman. Alveraz tips his ten gallon hat at twenty-first century pop-culture. He strikes his best Eastwood pose and removes the cast iron from beneath his serape exposing his heart to the world. Hot Mud Poems is the work of an artist that has no qualms about showing his sensitive underbelly, while still not afraid of being a man. Like Sam Shepard, actor, playwright, screenwriter, director, story writer and poet, Alveraz let’s his work do his talking for him. Alveraz, like Shepard is as comfortable in front of the camera as he is behind it. His poems show a poet’s sensibilities and sensitivities with the pragmatism and dictatorial control of a director.
His poem, The Polar Bear Hunter, contains the lyrical machismo of James Dickey’s latter works. Turbans And Tacos, is a self-deprecating way at laughing at America’s perpetual state of fear since 911. Pull The Blinds is powerful emotion carved into paper that reveals the dysfunctions from America’s heritage of sexual repression. Garbage is written with the same “balls to the wall” energy as anything by Bukowski. Hot Mud Poems is a welcome addition to the cannon of today’s post-post-modern male poets.