Age of the Demon Tools
Mark Spitzer
Ahadada Books
ISBN Number: 9780980887310

Reviewer: Janelle Adsit


          Age of the Demon Tools attempts to codify an age, and it reduces it to a single synecdoche—demonic tools. Its contents include the social and political lambasting of a McDisneyworld, me-pod consumerism, an unremittingly violent culture, and a sprawling, gluttonous, and wasteful America. The target of Spitzer’s derision is hard to miss, so wide and inclusive is it.

          The book is relentless in its presentation of the demonic, and that entails that it exists relative to innocence. “In the yarden of the apple tree” begins the book, and in the allusion Spitzer promises knowledge. The eradicated innocence can be heard in the conspicuously onomatopoetic and alliterative lines such as “a Flapalooza of Flinging Fladdle!/ Uvulas of Udder Grubbage!/ Gorges Gorged with Grodilation.” Here Spitzer mimics the sound of a children’s book. But the alliterative, internal, and end rhymes allow for a sarcastically sing-song tone, as in the lines:

& oh yeah, The Reborn
            Holding hands w/ NRA
            & machine guns are legal again
            oh happy day!

          In sixty pages, Age of the Demon Tools gives the illusion of being a comprehensive cataloguing of vice and atrocity, including obesity, mad bombers, slime, acid vomit, premenstrual dysmorphic disorder, flatulence, rape-waifs, scurvy rats, and STDs. Spitzer lists, with bullet points, headlines from theadvocate.com including “Thousands feared drowned in New Orleans” and “Baghdad stampeded kills 800 Shiite pilgrims.” He unflinchingly writes, “a seven year old girl got cornered in the shitter/ & gangbanged by a bunch of juvies/ force-fucking her ‘skank pussy.’” Spitzer asks the reader to remain in the presence of the poetic version of a machine gun rapidly firing off damages.

          To the question, “is this where it all condenses into mush?” (which is raised near the book’s close), an affirmative answer is certainly supportable. To some ears, Spitzer will seem monotonously crass. He no doubt will turn some readers away with lines such as

HEAR YE, HEAR YE
THE MICHAEL JACKSON SCANDAL OF BUTT-HUMPERY
PT. 11:

fONDLING tHE cANCERBOY!!!

          And the book is too unidirectional and one-sided to convince. The book may be a welcome outcry to those who are objecting too, but it is as sprawling and excessive as its conception of contemporary America—and that makes for imprecise and rambling rhetoric. It has the unfortunate tendency to overstate. (West Nile and mass-mutilation are claimed to be constant, for instance. “We always give ourselves a Swirly” too. And, apparently, no one ever wonders/ if there’s something/ in the water.”)

          If it is read as something other than an attempted argument for cultural reform, however, the book becomes an important contribution to contemporary poetry. Spitzer is one of the most mass-media literate poets writing today. This highly allusive book becomes an index for 21^st Century American culture and its various modes of information transmission. It is a New Media text with poem titles drawn from email spam: “bigger d1ck in 2 weeks int” and “Dear I, Prince of Nigeria, seeking honest venture do require.” The collection’s most prominent poem, titled “Unholy Millenial Litany!!!,” at once visually imitates an email chain letter written in all caps and echoes the rhythms of Ginsberg’s “Howl” with its use of long lines and anaphora.

          Read with a particular mindset, Age of the Demon Tools offers a linguistic study. Spitzer incorporates a text-messaging-friendly lexicon including “fugly,” “nuther,” “gayluv,” and “texass” as much as he favors neologisms that may soon hit the Google hot trends list. Spitzer creates these neologisms by hybridizing words and spinning off from their sonic cousins: “shaggilation,” “Mediacity,” “perploding,” and the fateful “Afghaniraq.”

          Language is on display in this book. What does it mean, the book would have us ask, to abbreviate bloodshed, masoned graves, and a complex political situation to “Civ War”? To misspell “obliterate” as “ebliterate” when the topic at hand is as grave as the loss of journalist’s lives? This book exposes a literacy of war that both contrasts with and tears a cover off of the formalized rhetoric of the mainstream media and the White House:

so Kanada refused to play
            but sent troops anyway
            for Petrolius will reconstruct!
            but then we blew em
            the fugg away.

          The poet writes from an emotional place that is in sharp contrast to the history-making that is, in Spitzer’s mind, digestion in a “distant/ indifferent intestine.” Spitzer’s account is punctuated with triple exclamation marks—certainly not the punctuation of choice when one is trying to appear neutrally detached.

          But even in the highly-charged affective space of this book, there is room for cold numbers. Spitzer inserts data on the prevalence of contaminants such as endrin, dieldrin, and heptachlor in the fish of Thomas Hill Lake. The Tuesday diet of one “250-pound fatkid/ age seven” seems to be an extension of the lake data, conveying that “4 snausages, 3 eggos, 1 bowl lucky charms w/ milk, and 1 can diet orange crush” is contaminant data too.

          One of the more subtle messages of the book is the interconnectedness of our environment and culture, which can be seen in lines such as these:

cuz this foolchain is just as translucent
   as the grass shrimp

     cuz there is no muni-council here
            nor no test tubes
            or agencies of any kind

            just an anorexic possum
            retching in the ethersphere

          Given the book’s scope—where little of contemporary American culture escapes Spitzer’s critical eye—and the brassy tone it employs, perhaps it is surprising that the book ends on the note that it does:

—as if that’s it
and it is
in all its
inglorious
lack

          The coda is relatively quiet, which perhaps serves to offer some much-needed reprieve. Or maybe the underlying point all along has been to highlight this inglorious lack. A statement hidden by a lot of talk—the talk of media channels blaring and lines of poetry calling much attention to themselves. A statement that might not be heard until the book is closed. But might not have been heard at all were the book never opened.