High Life

Poetry. "'I am on dead songbird patrol...' Phil Estes's poems start out as slacker jokes but then they go wrong. Sometimes they go so wrong that they become frightening and politically charged or become beautiful meditations on art. Or do both at the same time. 'Mmm-hmm' has never sounded as prophetic and poetic as in these snippets from a scary-funny Middle America. Lets call him the Mallarmé of the Strip Mall."—Johannes Göransson