In “Poem Before Mirror”, Dinh admits that any human face is, in the long run, only a cover for what’s underneath. Midway through the poem, he writes:

     So sloppily made, will this face
     Last a day or a week? Already
     Discolored, musty and sagging
     From mere seconds ago.

And then in the final stanza, as it often does, the truth comes out:

     A breathtakingly radiant face
     Still can’t complete with more
     Salient and silent parts of
     Its ensouled package.

The sour tone of the poem suddenly shifts to a kind of reverence for the crappy miracle that is humanity, deploying alliterative sounds (salient, silent, ensouled) along the way. That’s the surprise here and in much else of Dinh’s work. He might come across as a cranky, profane misanthrope, but the undercurrent is a deep, compassionate understanding of what it means to be human, to live life trapped in a human body. Our faces (and all of our holes) are simply one part of the story. What Dinh is really interested in, underneath the disgust, is our humanity.

Very much a contemporary poet, Dinh writes about the hostility of the internet (“normally, one hesitates before calling someone an idiot or/ an asswipe face to face”), the flotsam and jetsam of media culture (“Tila Tequila isn’t/ all that”) and this era, in which the archaic assurances that poetry could matter have been stripped away. Dinh is unconvinced that poetry exists in order to redeem or save us. Arguably, this is a good thing: it means writers like Dinh are free to do whatever they want, however they want. In “What a Wand”, he expands on the sense of futility that accompanies the modern notion of poetry, writing that poetry is really

     A chance porthole into the real
     A glancing clarification, more
     Than just horizontal euphony,
     Poetry still feels false within
     The context of this slammer
     Of mushy minds and bodies,
     Yours also. Truly.

This is cynicism and transcendence, old and new. If poetry feels phony it is only because its truth so startlingly contrasts the cruddiness of our human circumstances. The way it rings false to our muddled human senses is an indicator of its greater truth.

Dinh ends the book with a series of increasingly abstract poems exploring the intersections between food and language and juxtaposing the rich varieties of Vietnamese verbs and their limited English translations.  It’s a logical place for a book so obsessed with orifices to finish. Language, after all, is a way of naming things we take into ourselves and things we push out.

Linh Dinh is not a badass because he writes poems that deploy f-bombs with an enviable insouciance, or because he writes from a place of race and  class rarely visited in the often elite world of contemporary poetry; he’s a badass because he’s capable of writing startlingly beautiful poems about shitting, fucking, and human frailty and ugliness. Throughout the collection, there are moments of real revelatory transcendence, like looking through a microscope at a slide of feces only to discover that a turd has transformed into a gemstone. 

_{Some Kind of Cheese Orgy is available from Chax Press and Small Press Distribution.} ____________________________________________________________________________________________

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