Man-Corn in the Promised Land

Man-Corn in the Promised Landopens with a startling and unnerving quote “you must first learn the wisdom of the stomach and not digest yourself,” which sets the reader on a crazed frenzy for the following pages to come. With a mythical, outlandish quality, the poems and prose selections in the book delineate very tragic ends to a grim and elliptical means of narration. There is this constant dread, waiting for the other shoe to drop in these page turners, where “the predator longs for the prey/ as the prey longs for the predator” in tales of cannibalism, fate and wildness, policy, warfare, and the overall decay of human condition (Gustave Speaks); the irony embedded in the title of a “promised land” is spun outrageously on its head as every select piece in the book portrays an otherwise, spiraling out of control backdrop filled with massive horror and corruption: “as we look down from the attic window/ like griffin vultures/ waiting for…the kill” (A Plague of Lions) and as “The kids like ripened fruit/ Are falling from the trees” (Good Friday on the Rez). Though there are many interesting and unusual moments, the reader grows tired and restless in one instance after another with the overload and overkill of fatalistic stimuli.