Mark Spitzer is an awesome writer who teaches at LSU-Baton Rouge. These two books show two very different sides of Spitzer.

The Pigs Drink from Infinity is a collection of autobiographical poems. Spitzer is a current-day bohemian, living on the fringes of society, driving undependable automobiles, sleeping with DSM-worthy females and smoking pot with his low-rent neighbors. Like Bukowski or Rimbaud, he infuses this lived territory with a luminous sense of self-awareness.

Chum, on the other hand, is a thoroughly fictional account of a bestial Alaskan backwater where a shipwrecked pop-tart lives among feral natives who barely persist in a hotbed of incest and superstition. It belongs to a genre with works like David Carson's LAMENT-- works that glory and wallow in the exposure of the sadism and sexual violence of America's frontiers.

I hope that Spitzer can bring the lucidity and immediacy of his poetry into his fictional work in the future. Nevertheless, they're both a lot of fun-- even if Chum is a bit hard to take. The Pigs is great-- just wish there was more!