Silver reviewed in CROSS

By chance I learned yesterday that my book of butchered poetry published last year was reviewed in the "literature" section of the Cultural Review Of the Society for the Sanctity of the family, a flimsy journal with the somewhat creative acronym CROSS, published somewhere in the darks of fuckin' Newfoundland.

The idiocy starts in line 1 of the review:

We were, perhaps inadvertently, sent this galley volume of animal-slaughter themed poetry by the publicity department of a deservedly obscure and ill-organized press called Fallen Albatross Books.

(I count seven errors in that sentence alone.) We can only imagine our erstwhile reviewer Reginald May's growing confusion as he passed the first 55 pages of the collection without coming across a single reference to animals, abattoirs, or the sale or consumption of meat. Assuming he read the book any more than skimming the back cover and two or three randomly selected pages. Assuming he can read at all, or understands that poetry is not just prose with a ragged right margin, or knows that the garlicky piss spewing from his mouth is not the same as the considered opinion of a trained literary critic.

He misunderstands the very concept of a poetry collection:

The selection of poems in this volume, all by a single author of clear counter-cultural proclivities but with no unity of purpose, plot, theme or style, defeats all comprehension.

Even the closing words of the review fail to engage in any way with the literary merit, cultural context, generic conceits or thematic content of my book, the words and poems therein, or even any recognition of the talent and history of the author. His criticisms, while I really do take them as a compliment, are so banal and inept as to beggar belief:

To be perfectly frank, the work lacks dignity, gravitas and taste, not to mention the kind of social responsibility that we at CROSS like to endorse.

To be perfectly frank, Mr May, I wouldn't shit in your mouth unless it were from a great height and I had some assurance of protection against splash-back.