Birthdays Before and After by Puma Perl
(Beyond Baroque Books, 2019)
REVIEWED BY DAVID LAWTON
…time slipping by with so little to waste…
In 2014, when greatweather for MEDIA decided to add single poet collections alongside our yearly anthologies, there was only one writer considered to establish the aesthetic we wanted to build. That writer was Puma Perl. Puma is the personification of a working writer. Someone with a dedicated writing discipline which she carries onto the performance stage. And she does it in New York City, with the epitome of New York attitude. In that poetry collection we published, Retrograde, Puma effectively guided the reader back in her past to enumerate the ghosts she needed to acknowledge in order to move forward in her life. To this day, it is consistently one of our press’s best sellers.
Since the release of Retrograde, Puma has kept writing, and has taken her readings on the road, touring extensively on the west coast and beyond. She has collaborated with a collective of New York City rock and roll musicians, performing as Puma Perl and Friends, who are regular contributors to the monthly series she curates at the Bowery Electric, called Puma Perl’s Pandemonium. And in 2016, she was a recipient of the Kathy Acker Award, the gold standard in outsider arts.
All this preamble is pertinent to our matter at hand, Perl’s latest collection, Birthdays Before and After, which examines the poet’s more recent years. The framework of the collection involves the author’s birthdays, and other benchmark days as well. Days perfect and imperfect, as she fights a battle with time “Despite the birthdays rolling on”. The days establishing relationships with kindred souls such as the west coast poets Scott Wannberg and David Smith, doing some poems and playing some music, while on the east coast the elder poet Bob Hart tosses brand new poems aside once their cherry has been popped to have an impromptu dance with Puma, and the youngblooded Jimmy the Saint arrives to the party, brimming with creativity and charisma. The fact that all these inspiring friends, plus a handful of others noted, have passed away over the last ten years for various reasons, helps heighten the poet’s sense of urgency. The deaths of two major heroes ups the ante on the urgency, as Perl dreams on the night that David Bowie died,
Nobody saw me
Glitter, blue and silver and gold,
Rained down upon us…
And plays a set on the day Lou Reed passed,
I linger on
Rock n Roll Animal all day long…
That’s not to say the book is maudlin. Like always in a Puma Perl book, there are those deadpan lines that will make you bust a gut, as in “Black Leopards” when a lover notices the poet wearing a different bra,
Yes, I change regularly, I noted…
And there is plenty of rough longing. In hotel rooms, the back seats of cars, against the wall in the alley.
…I break into jagged pieces
Men slit their throats on me…
Even as Puma moves forward, she sees the ghosts of her past struggles with greater clarity.
…What kind of woman stops nursing a baby
So she can shoot dope?…
But in the closing set of poems, her musical collaborators begin to appear in the poems. You may not know their names, but this is not a case of some vanity name dropping of friends. This is the gathering of fellow travelers. This is the power of one artistic discipline joining hands with another for the benefit of both. This is the kind of friendship that sees you through the clattering downtown night until the dawn. This is when a poetry collection can also become an instructional guide for living the life you are driven to live.
I don’t want to quote any more lines. It’s almost like spoilers in the movies. You want to experience this shit in context. So let me say, if you don’t know it already: Puma Perl is the real deal. She is the most consistent and accessible writer going. The kind of writer whose work you should always support. But since this particular book brings together the best of the east and west coast traditions, as Puma has worked with the LA area institution Beyond Baroque as her publisher, with Iris Berry of Punk Hostage Press fame as editor, you can be assured that you are getting a benchmark moment of the literary continuum. Rock on, Puma Perl!!!
Birthdays Before and After
Puma Perl
Beyond Baroque Books, 2019
ISBN: 978-1892184207