Deliciously wicked satires about local and international celebrities, the poems in Portable Altamont evince an irrepressible grasp of the zeitgeist, its machinations and manipulations, its possibilities and puerility. Who other than artist and raconteur Brian Joseph Davis could have imagined Margaret Atwood as a human beatbox, Jessica Simpson applying for arts grants or the Swedish Chef reciting T. S. Eliot? Davis uses every literary form available to revel in and rearrange pop culture. Even the index turns into a short story about Luke Perry’s descent into a shadowy underworld of Parisian intellectuals and terrorists.
A word of warning: this book is a complete and utter fiction. Philip Roth is not David Lee Roth’s brother. Reese Witherspoon is not a Communist cell leader, and Don Knotts has never been a New Age guru. The stuff about Nicole Richie, however, is absolutely true.
Portable Altamont is that rare book that is both incendiary and compulsively readable. Get to it before the lawyers do!
