G.D. Master

A short biography about the Graphite Drug Master can be found at the end of his book “Interpretations”. For readers wishing to contact Graphite Drug Master with questions or about swapping reviews on SmashWords, please use his email address: graphitedrug@gmail.com In the interest of swapping reviews, please have a free book of poetry available and an easy to find email address on SmashWords or within your book.

alternative    contemporary    idaho    interpretive    pantoums    poetry    prose    sestinas    sonnets    villanelles   

• The Fringe Poetry Cafe on May 13, 2016
  
  The Fringe Poetry Café by an assorted group of artists is an entertaining read that can be done in an hour. Like all good poetry, it does not leave readers guessing for longer than it takes to be enticed by the next line or stanza of well thought writing. All the poems in this collection have a penetrating effect due to experienced writers that have lived long in England and are not tarnished or softened by much of the positivism promoted by the West’s commercial culture. Some stand out works include Absinthe, Where did the money go?, A Cot-Side Sonnet, etc. etc.
  
• Dogwood on May 13, 2016
  
  Dogwood by Thomas M. McDade is a dark and humorous read. Its narrative poems, when not drawing out lengthy descriptions of ghastly and unthinkable situations, could be poetic stories without their line breaks. McDade’s poetry is worth reading, if not for its author’s dry humor, for the sheer ability of his poems to make light of loss and death. McDade does not simply poke fun or offer late night punch lines, but enlightens readers with his experience and ability to keep moving forward in life during its most disturbing moments.
  
• Thoughts & Observations on Stuff on May 16, 2016
  
  Thoughts & Observations on Stuff by Steven Olofson is a layperson’s poetry book seemingly written more for self-expression rather than any conceived audience. It is filled with simplicities that many educated poets are taught to leave behind such as generalities, articles, and confessional musings. These things aside, the author shows potential with such poetic concepts as time experienced by distant subjects and affects of the unseen on self-awareness. Some entertaining pieces within Olofson’s book are Beauty, Cat in the Window, and Ode to a hemorrhoid.
  
• Caged Souls on May 16, 2016
  
  Caged Souls by Bora Bug is an unusual collection of what seem to be rants from somebody who has lived outside the U.S. The works in this book are short lines, one to five words, with no punctuation. The violent poems suggest a war torn landscape hinting that America’s urban communities may be a needed break from anarchic regions of the world. These writings would likely go over well in rowdy bars bellowed forth like barbarian war cries from a slurring lush in a general’s tattered uniform. Obnoxious at best, the works in this book lead to more questions about the author than about what he has written.
  
• Summer Serenade The Golden Path Spring Laid on May 17, 2016
  
  Summer Serenade. . . by Barbara M Schwarz is an epic poem that dwells on the topic of spring. Aside from its copyright and beginning material along with a half page of creative commentary at its end, Summer Serenade’s 3,380 words are all one poem. The entire poem rhymes AA-BB-CC etcetera, more or less, with a consistent meter. Readers that can maintain their sing-song fortitude till the poem’s end are rewarded with a plethora of imaginative rhymes and subjects abstracted into metaphors of spring. It is difficult to think about the amount of work the author went through to create such a lengthy piece while maintaining such meter and rhyme.
  
• Free Poetry E-Book on May 24, 2016
  
  Free Poetry E-Book by Nikhil Parekh is a collection of poems collected from other books that he has written. Most of the poems have a repeated introductory clause or sentence in each stanza and can become repetitious. The language of his works is detailed without any cathartic experience, and consists of an endless variety of adjectives and adverbs, making the poems whimsical and enjoyable in their exaggerated moments. Parekh often writes poems regarding his faith and God. His poems suggest he is of an Islamic faith and they offer an interesting view into another culture for most Americans. Some more entertaining moments in Parekh’s book are: Aftermaths of Pinching, Fantasy Seldom Becomes Reality, When I Thought.
  
• Big Fish Little Fish Cardboard Box on May 28, 2016
  
  Astonishingly beautiful! This free e-book contains technically savvy and fun to read poetry. While there is no adherence to a particular form, there are poetically learned works and sentences presented poetically that create whole works that draw the reader into another world. Occasionally dreams can be quite entertaining and lead people to wake up with smiles on their faces. These dreams when remembered and pondered make absolutely no sense, yet allow people to enjoy otherwise empty moments and fill an impressionable void with enjoyable substance. Like such dreams, these poems capture the tranquility of human absurdity while celebrating its inevitable chaos. Well worth the time to open or download!
  
• Growth on June 01, 2016
  
  Growth by Karin Cox is a collection of contemporary rhyming poetry that is well written and holds the reader’s interest. While the poems are feminist in nature and explore female sexuality, they have romantic and erotic qualities that arouse all people. Well-crafted and descriptive, the poems take readers unfamiliar with Cox’s residential environment on a titillating vacation through radiant cityscapes and scintillating affairs. The poetic language of the poems expresses a wide variety of experience and emotions while remaining positive to the human experience, an enjoyable and entertaining read.
  
• The Black Book And Other Poems on Nov. 15, 2016
  
  Rik Hunik’s e-book of poems, “The Black Book and Other Poems” could be considered enjoyable low-brow fair. While the poems in his book are not academic marvels or meditative confessional drivel, they are quite fun to read and entertaining. More to the point: while his poetic style tends to dwell on contemporary rhyme, his ability to narrate horror and fantasy tales along with some pop-culture humor keeps readers from losing interest or becoming bored of a sing-song pattern. Some really bright spots in Hunik’s book are Chapter Two: Sonnets, The Ghoul, and Black Sabbath 1980. Hunik’s Sonnets seem inspired by Petrarchan sonnet forms. They vary a bit in their sestets, but their octets are mostly ABBA-CDDC. While they are not completely in pentatonic, they are close enough to see that the poet has some command of the form. “The Ghoul” seems to be an epic poem made up of quatrains. With its gratuitous gore and gross-out factor it is a comical and amusing bit of entertainment. For people who grew up listening to Black Sabbath and Ozzy during the eighties, “Black Sabbath 1980” will bring back some memories and is plain fun reading.
  
• One Hundred Poems, Volume VII on Nov. 28, 2016
  
  As written in Vainio’s description, “I decided to write one poem per day until I would have one thousand poems.” This experiment, writing a poem a day, is not as difficult as finding different subject matter every day to write about. The problem is most people lead trivial lives on a daily basis, keep a journal every day and see how different your days are over a month, a year, and so on. Most people end up spending much of their time in touch with passive media (news, radio, television, Internet) and conversing about it with others. For people who have done the poem-a-day experiment or kept a journal, most of the writing ends up being media commentary, notice the massive amount of poems based on election coverage and other daily news stories in Vainio’s work. That said: most of the poems in this book are commentaries that rhyme and have no meter. While these poems avoid sing-song patterns, their rhyming aspect can become burdensome after a few poems. There is no doubt that these poems show a critical attempt at complex poetry, but their style reflects an acceptance of limitation rather than poetic expansion, for instance their use of capitals at the beginning of every line and close adherence to rhyming schemes that are not formally diverse (AABB, AAAA, etc.). An interesting approach would be for the next volume of poetry to include experiments with meter and form such as sonnets with iambic pentameter or villanelles and pantoums, even haiku would be welcome change here.
  
• Pick Up the Pearl on Dec. 19, 2016
  
  Pick Up the Pearl by Pat McGowan is a strong collection of non-rhyming contemporary poetry. McGowan’s poems are well crafted with a sense of colloquial meter and patient mechanics, if not a simple academic approach to writing. While his works are not seemingly commercial fair, like that of most published academics, they are interesting narratives that will engage readers and hold their interests. His poetic subject matter is martial arts philosophy, which upon first hearing led me to think “Pashaw!”; but, after reading his poems and being drawn into his stories, I was pleased and enjoyed the brief time it took me to read his work. For anybody stumbling upon this book, take the time to read it. It’s fun and the writing is actually good.
  
• You're Going To Laugh At This on Dec. 27, 2016
  
  The title of this collection of poems is misleading; that is unless, the author is practicing a form of visual sarcasm that makes more sense in face to face conversation than on paper. With that said, the poems in this collection are interesting given their descriptive and compulsive awareness of the author’s sensory perception of his immediate environment and attitude towards life in general. Technically, these poems are made up of short lines, often containing one word, leading readers to assume some form of colloquial punctuation when convenient question marks and commas are not used. It is easy for readers to stumble over sentences because of capitals beginning at each line without periods at their ends. This is a side effect of the author’s perception of line break punctuation. The most successful author regarding line break techniques without punctuation would be the great master A. R. Ammons. The writer of these works will want to read some of Ammons’s work. It is less difficult for poets who use punctuation and do not capitalize every line. This is common in contemporary poetry. Jeffery’s poetry, while not up to high academic standards, is fun to read. It is mostly descriptive with sparse narrative and occasional bouts of confessional mishaps and ornery exclamations.
  
• A Few Powerful Spaces on Jan. 30, 2017
  
  Maxwell’s “A Few Powerful Spaces” rings evident with beatnik inspiration freely established and distributed by early gurus of peace, harmony, and intellectual madness: Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. The poems in this book can be challenging with their multi-layered adjectives; phrases concocted from all parts of speech and divided by commas, line breaks and stanzas, resulting in descriptive blurs and occasional concrete images. While the style of poetry expressed by this author can be argued as extensive comma spliced meandering, it does carry with it a dreamy cohesive appeal that may draw some readers in and even compel them to conjure comprehensible imagery and meaning. Like much of Ginsberg’s work, Maxwell’s surfs the outer foam of rational breakwater in a sea of textual meaning, but unlike the beatnik master, Maxwell does not capture a discernable folklore or imagistic power rising from collective human experience. While Maxwell’s writing does not capture the spirit of a generation, it does manage to entertain on a level successive to that of modern beatnik writers.
  
• Last Gasp of the Monkey Mind: Even More Poems and Chance Discoveries on Feb. 27, 2017
  
  Last Gasp of the Monkey Mind by Rob O’Keefe is a short collection of easily accessible poems for recreational readers. The use of punctuation in this collection is inconsistent. Some have punctuation; others have convenient punctuation, and some have regular prose punctuation. Fortunately, O’Keefe is keen to writing in colloquial English, so readers are not side tracked by any wild experimentation. The poetry in this collection works due to imagery, direct language, and light heartedness. For instance, At a Loss contains unique and relatable imagery: “baby strollers are stacked against violets/ penny candy, the kind with the colorful dots laid out on paper.” Economical Haiku is a humorous observation of this form’s relativism. Birthday Cards, again, contains interesting and fun relatable imagery. The major criticism of these poems, if reviewed academically, is their excessive use of “the.” This article is always looked down on in academic circles. Excluding this criticism, these poems are entertaining and worth reading entirely as a collection. O’Keefe is adept at expressing his playful visions and should consider continuing to peruse his poetic interest.