Sexual Boat (Sex Boats), by James Gendron,  is a staggeringly clever amalgam of streams of consciousness, producing intense compressions of epiphanic or syntactic wit that are often contrasted against more humbling, human understandings.

Many of Gendron’s poems move through associative leaps that build off either structure or intent with ease, jolting the subject matter from line to line and stanza to stanza; much of this associative escalation can be observed in the poem “XXX BOAT X”, excerpted below.

XXX BOAT X

Your left side opens
A dog sleeps in you
A dog sleeps in you and fangs grow through his skin
Your little pal there in the dark is chomping you to sleep

The imagery of the poem is layered with just enough associative similarity to imply a narrative relationship to each of its increasingly strange (somewhat terrifying) lines. The second person is dissected, then imbibed with a beast--a beast which is at first sleeping, but grows fangs and, by the final line,  is familiarized as an assumed thing that is now awake, chewing (perhaps eating) the second person to sleep. The growing associated surrealism of each sequential line is what often lends Gendron’s poems, though small in size, such gravitas.

The other element of Sexual Boats (Sex Boats) contributing to overall cogency lies within the interjections of aware realism, of sometimes sad and sometimes exuberant moments of real and tangible ordinary life that allow the surrealism of poems like XXX BOAT X to touch ground for the reader: it is this unity of wit and wonder and weary that ultimately enables the reader to weather Gendron’s storms of imagery with clarity, and wonder of their own. The following excerpt of the poem “Gordando” embodies this ideal perfectly, and makes for a fitting conclusion to such a brief review of such a broad and (forgive me) sexy boat of work.

GORDANDO

My best friend is having a son, hence
i’m too old to be having a best friend.
Already I hear the brand new brain
of the son filling with awesome thoughts
i’m moving to Portland
in order to give him room to be born.
I imagine my friend and I as strangers,
and it’s easy, because I have
an excellent imagination. Poetry
is easy: you write whatever you want.