Galley of the Beloved in Torment

Kyle McCord's Galley of the Beloved in Torment bears the standard of les poètes maudits, the accursed poets, of Rimbaud, Corbière, Mallarmé, et al., and of their forefather Baudelaire. Like the speaker in many of McCord's poems, these fi n-de-siècle poets thrive in the outskirts, fi ngering the hem of society, free to witness her unraveling. Although McCord wrote Galley of the Beloved in Torment some 125 years aft er this time, his book parades the same Decadent style, a style indicative of high sentence, sensuality, social deviance, and the bizarre, to name a few, but enough to stoke our, as Marlow said in Heart of Darkness, "fascination of the abomination." -Ezekiel Black Kyle McCord is a wickedly lavish poet. His scope is broad, his syllables exactingly chosen. The Galley of the Beloved in Torment brings us the pleasure of fable, the "hot breath of one rock on another," the spectacle of life transformed. -Noy Holland Kyle McCord delicately folds promises, prophecies, laments, lists and directives into poems that exhibit both high mastery and intense earnestness. Lines shift and vary in unpredictable ways, as do the poems' speakers, who observe, summon, question, caution, and - above all else - morph. The line between man's best and beast repeatedly blurs. The personal terrifyingly melts into the global in an intimate overlay. Galley of the Beloved in Torment is not love poetry, nor political poetry, nor philosophical poetry; it is all those at once, slippery and sly yet hardhitt ing in a fantastic(al) blend. -YZ Chin