Given my variable history with veteran Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert (then and now of POETRY SUPERHIGHWAY fame), anything I say about Rick's published output will be considered suspect (or tainted) by some in the SoCal poetry community.
But I'll just say briefly that SINZIBUCKWUD (title referring to Canadian maple syrup) is a chapbook about Rick and wife Addie and son Jude's trip to Quebec waiting to be unearthed from a too-long volume.
If you're a everything-he-does-is-magic fan of Rick's minimalistic-deadpan humor, there will be poems you'll appreciate (the ones that stood out for me include "Criminal" and "Apologies If This One Isn't For You").
But, this time around, there's an absence of quality control--meaning that at least a third of the book could have been discarded.
As I have learned in the past, bringing up the issue of quality control to Rick (especially in public) is something likely to cause negative emotions on his part.
I'm not doing this to be cheap or petty or needlessly negative--more from the viewpoint of a longtime admirer of the artiste inside him.
Unfortunately, Rick's likely to turn to the friends/sycophants/well-wishers who will vastly outnumber me and not bother offering him grains of sand that could become the makings of future literary pearls.
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