fat chance

One Sunday in January, a few days home from a pleasant holiday in Japan, I caught a tram to the city to exchange what spending money we hadn't spent at the first money changer I saw. I got $87 for ¥10,000.

Fresh cash in my pocket, Dymock's bargain books mezzanine was just around the corner. There I had once held but not purchased Kent MacCarter's remaindered California Sweet, while Ouyang Yu, I suspect, eyed me across the floor. That was what, two years ago? Perhaps it was still there, maybe Ouyang too. I would say hello this time, I would say: Ouyang? I had you once as a teacher.

California Sweet wasn't there, nor was Ouyang. There were four recent Vagabonds on discount, an expensive Ron Padgett, a surplus Eavan Boland and someone else from overseas reduced but not cheap. I've bought poetry cheap from the mezzanine before, a Pam Brown, a Gig Ryan, but not today. 

So downstairs I went to the full-price poetry section. There among the Plaths and Lawsons and Rupi Kaurs were two copies of a new Kent MacCarter release I hadn't heard of: Fat Chance. It's full of his plane crash poems, one of which I'd read before. It cost $25 dollars. I held on to it. 

The sales assistant was noting something and ignored me as I stood at the counter. I returned to the top of the queue, she called me back saying, I just had to get down that sentence. Working in a bookshop writing on the job like Kris Hemensley. I guess she was in her twenties. Coming home from Japan I have been overly communicative with shop assistants. I will get less so. 

Twenty five dollars, 24.99, enough for a good lunch in Tokyo for two: set meal, bowl of rice, miso, tea. I am writing this to justify my purchase. I best get on with it.

I read on the train home. The station seemed strange when I got off. Was that the poetry or culture shock? The second read was a before-sleep dip, the third on my front step in the sun.

Before the poems, there's an appraisal by Lisa Gorton and an appreciative essay by Jessica Wilkinson, which is 2.5 pages long - an introduction one would think would belong to a republished edition, a critical framework, maybe. I skipped it for laters.

The opening poem is a vignette about a prize pig, a cameo with what seems a proofing error, a doubling hard to make sense of in the context of prose:

For years, Corndog was a popular attraction at the McLeod County Fair for years...

The plane crash survival and unlikely violent death narrations that follow are in an asynchronous prose, but there’s nothing surplus like that ‘for years’. There are dates or years for titles, flight numbers, make of plane. There are beheadings, strewn tendons and lucky sole survivors. 

Corndog returns in a follow-up vignette to frame the sequence, hence the book's cover - a pink silhouette of a pig, on black, sliced horizontally by a white line and white jumbo jet taking off or tail-ending it. 

More non-fiction constructions come: a letter-to-Santa sequence interlarded with medical details on objects left inside the bodies of patients after surgery; an imagined company history of an eighties cabbage patchesque doll. Then sketches of photos in ten lines, which I liked best, their clipped disjuncture (a tautological phrase, a wishy washy one). And the last poem is good too, a San Francisco... collage? I'd better reread it to check.

Sometimes I justify buying books by thinking of them as gifts. I thought of my friend Adrian taking Fat Chance to the counter, but when I went to his place last week, I decided not to gift it, anxious about his anxiety and passing on something disconcerting.

And now I notice the blurb - 'this feel-bad book of the year' - written by the publisher, I guess upswell's owner maybe. Last week, we went round to sister Natalie's to feed her cat, Kitty, who had vomited on the knotted carpet in her lounge. On Nat's bedside table was a copy of John Waters' Liarmouth: A feel-bad romance. Is feel-bad a genre? Dymock's's barcode sticker files the book under the categories POP and RANDOM.

The poems reminded me of:

• Eliot Weinberger
• Readers' Digest
• Archival photos from 1930s U.S. government surveys with black holes punched through them.

There was a plane crash while we were in Japan, at Haneda airport. We'd flown from Haneda the morning before the accident and watched the news as it broke on TV. Four hundred people escaped down the slides everyone ignores being shown about by flight crew before take off. Five people on a small plane headed to earthquake rescue efforts at Noto Peninsula died. On TV re-enactments were performed by news hosts landing and taxiing model planes across replica mdf tarmacs. An earthquake days earlier had left tens of thousands of mostly elderly people in midwinter without shelter, heat or water. TV experts demonstrated how to keep warm by stuffing plastic bags inside your jacket.