A review of Alice By Louis Bourgeois
Leave a child to its own devices and it will rip the legs off a live frog, eat its own feces and stick its
fingers into the eye sockets of another child, but feel no pain, suffer no guilt. This is the sort of
unguarded mind I attached to Louis Bourgeois as I read his “Alice,” 31 sometimes lunatic prose poems
which are written with such abandon I found myself gripping the page’s edge for balance. Though I had
occasionally happened upon the odd Bourgeois poem in the past, I’d never really picked up on what
this full Presa collection affords me the opportunity to do: delve more deeply inside the madness
of his imaginary world; but wonder, is it imaginary to him?
Alice
By Louis Bourgeois
PRESA :S: PRESA
PO Box 792
Rockford MI 49341
(no ISBN shown)
US $6
40 pages
Presa Press
Spiel was 6 months old when the dark years of WWII were unleashed.
He was 50 and in psychotherapy when it dawned on him the fear present in his parent’s bodies
at that time of unprecedented upheaval surely must have had a profound affect on him.
His newest chapbook, come here cowboy: poems of war, recently written at age 65
and released by Pudding House Publications in the fall of 2006, focuses on how wars,
stretching from WWI to today’s aggressive hostilities, have imprinted his life.
Email: Spiel
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