Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes

The poems in <i>Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes</i> are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are manycancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving gracesa drag queen waitress whose painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight, strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds, Pink Floyds On the Turning Away sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead, black phoebes rattling winter / thistles, swollen throats percussing: / this is this is this is . . . Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes reminds us that where there is shadow there must, necessarily, also be light.