The Best of American Cannot Be Seen by J.B. Stevens

Every now and then, I, as a reader, need a palate cleanser. In between books about Average Joes seeking vengeance and detectives seeking some craven suspect, I will insert Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, or a well-worn copy of Charles Simic’s Jackstraws. Just to wash the grit out of my mouth, to stretch my brain out of the clenched-down posture my last stressful read has put it in. 

I had the good fortune of reading an advance copy of J.B. Stevens’s The Best of America Cannot Be Seen (out from Alien Buddha Press on July 4, appropriately enough), and it got me thinking that maybe some writers need a palate cleanser, too. Or, perhaps more likely, maybe some writers can handle multiple genres and a wide array of interests while I struggle to master one. 
Here’s the thing: J.B. Stevens is former combat infantry, a martial artist, and an award-winning writer of poetry, short and long fiction--someone I got to know, not surprisingly, for his work focusing on crime and military subjects. So when this same writer puts out a collection of uproarious but insightful poems taking on the full gamut of American pop culture, one cannot help but ask, “Where the hell did THAT come from?”

The answer, as the collection makes clear: A mind capable of shifting into many different gears without losing speed or traction.

The Best kicks off with the story of a a Yeti and a Sasquatch who, after finding no suitable mates in their respective habitats, meet over a “cryptozoological grindr” app. This idea is remarkable enough alone, and Stevens could have stopped there and left the reader chuckling. Yet the poem ends with the couple, separated by continents and oceans, wondering how they’ll manage the K-1 visa process so they can unite in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. Love, they conclude, shall find a way.

So it goes throughout the collection: Conceits connecting surprising threads, subjects approached at unexpected angles, but always with some fundamental aspect of American life and culture at their core. Guy Fieri’s popularity becomes a window into the concept of American exceptionalism with lines like “Houston--we have zero problems” and “Metric system doesn’t land on the moon/Or get you to Flavortown.” Elsewhere, Thanos has a regrettable plan for speeding up the DMV that we’ve all likely contemplated before; “The Smurfs” may or may not contain hidden messages regarding racial purity; and Kid Rock’s success causes one striving artist a crisis of confidence. The breadth of topics, from Taco Bell to Blockbuster to a two-poem cycle contemplating the utility of conspiracy theories, is as staggering as the execution.

Throughout the collection, I couldn’t shake an image of Stevens giving us all the side-eyed wink while reading them aloud. (Someone needs to make that event happen, by the way.) And yet these poems are not reducible to mere snark or fingers in the eye of American pop culture. He seems to relish as much as roast—for example, praising Taylor Swift while insisting she must be an alien. He does not simply reflect back the dominant culture we’re all immersed in, but asks in his unique way, why it has come to be so. Below the tongue-in-cheek presentation, he gives us much to chew on.

Having chewed on it myself, I will now return, refreshed, to my usual reading of PIs drinking way too much and framed men proving their innocence.

But in the back of my mind, I’ll still be rooting for the Yeti and the Sasquatch.