Turner, Michael: Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems

Anvil Press, paperback Publication Date: August 10, 2024 Publisher Marketing:  Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems documents the life and practice of a writer who grew up in a musical household, and spent his early adult years as a touring musician and his later years programming nightclubs, hotels, galleries, and festivals. Modelled after the American folk music revival songbooks of the 1950s and 60s, Playlist fiddles with a two-part writing system that begins with the songbooks’ contextual introductions and ends with the songs — or in this instance, poems — to which they refer. In Playlist, introductions can act less as supporting words than as discrete stories. At the same time, the poems they are in service of can appear indifferent to story, sentiment, and a writer who, in claiming to contextualize them, can only reduce them further. The approach championed here is derived from Angela Carter’s writings on burlesque — the exaggeration in this instance born from bina