Pro(m)bois(e)

Some celebrities detail their own wardrobe. Thibault Raoults «Pro(m)bois(e)» works like a failed rocket scientist turned aesthete warming up to detail the entirety of his brain. Too casually brilliant to sound like nonsense Raoults poems are also too brilliant and too far out there to resemble any poems we have seen yet on this planet... But «Pro(m)bois(e)» as far up in the ether as language gets also tastes of our daily dirt... When I first read Raoults poems ten years ago I thought he was an old man from some obscure trajectory of the French avant-garde not a kid in his twenties from Rochester New York. But nowadays hes a man in space with the mouth of a slap-happy oracle sending messages back to us: When two worlds flare in a stranger/They say fossils will take over New Boise /Assume anything. -Matthew Henriksen Dear reader Thibault Raoults poetry potlatch is for you and you and you. Sweet surgeon Raoults scalpel is a feather. He tickles your delight levers with cleverness--wows with somatic engines both aerial and astral. Eat your kidneys out Hesiod. Hey eat your liver out Shelley. Its Raoults turn to dandle the heir of the air on fire upon his versifying knee. Yes this exquisite myth resewing drifts at us like volcanic ash or jetsam or gypsum--true Raoults language way is spare supple effulgent. But the cultures of love will clabber in the end--wont they. And Raoults horizons hem does ahem--in the end. In the meankindtime dear reader you will do well to get in the way of these nimble lines: let em dissolve into you a la snow upon the tongue. Ill say this: the next time I drown Ill be secreting this book in a backpocket: rare and saving buoy; every word an antidote to turgid--and true. -Abraham Smith