Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, Jason Tandon
Black Lawrence Press, 2009
Paperback, $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-934703-59-5

A tour of margins: South San Ysidro, New Mexico; Lamb’s Grove, Iowa; Moosalamoo, Vermont; north of Albert Lea, Minnesota; Podunk; Hell. Places where “your mother name[s] you tough”; where in honor of Easter, Mister Donut tops “a traditional glazed / with yellow frosting and jellybeans.” Snails are ground into dirt. Jokes go too far, warrant a duel on League Night at the bowling alley.

As the Heckler of the title suggests, there’s humor to be found in these places. Tandon’s obvious amusement from the sublime allows for loving mock-sonnets to telemarketers and two-line poems that note

Lit up on the only marquee in town:
CURLY FRIES ARE BACK.

These poems stare at neighbors until they flip us off, yes, but then they turn around only pages later to remind us

A car-surfing sixteen-year-old
was sent skidding on her face. She’ll live.
Asphalt rash and a bone protruding.

A palm reader tells her client, “Your eyes are saggy diapers, your face a fallen mountain” while on the facing page teenagers dry hump, smoke dope, and soothe one another’s real grief, just enough.

The tenderness and pain of those teenagers continuously rubs against the acerbic wit of that fortuneteller. What begins as a collection of Americana quirk slowly bleeds into a collection of failed lives, both documented with equal reverence and skepticism. Once the humor goes, well, like the title says. The mystery is removed from the affair, the flowers become “a rewrapped / bouquet—severely discounted.” Dreams are lost in a tangle of verb tense—“I Had Wanted to Be an Archer”—and supplanted by the drone of daily life. Echoes of the book’s earlier drinking buddies are left sitting on their roof, chain smoking and listening to pop music, their wives and children gone, absolutely no punchlines in sight.

—reviewed by Dan Manchester