Four Winds Press
Laughing Cult
By Kevin McCaffrey
Poetry
June 2014
112 pages, $13.95 USD
Original Trade Paper Edition and Ebook
ISBN: 978-1-940423-00-5 (print), 978-1-940423-01-2 (ebook)
A highly accessible collection that combines a quirky sensibility with traditional poetic forms
Inspired by the spirit and approach of Bertolt Brecht’s Manual of Piety, the poems of Laughing Cult often employ the structures of ballads, folksongs, and other traditional forms to create miniature sketches marked by romantic ambiguity, occultism, science fiction, and quirky angst. Full of odd situations and memorable phrases, this first collection is as cool in tone as a Lee Konitz solo and as lacking in affect as pop art.
To shape something aesthetically charged out of the spent elements and enervated thoughts of a slowly failing society: that’s the challenge Laughing Cult has set for itself. These are two-dimensional poems for a one-dimensional age.
Several poems previously serialized on the website Exquisite Corpse.
Kevin McCaffrey is the author of the horror novel Nightmare Therapy. He works at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
