If Calvocoressi’s poetry leans toward something a lot of people will like, Brandon Scott Gorrell’s book, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want To Have a Biographer Present has more of the casual, not-giving-a-fuck attitude of an overly revealing Facebook status update. While aspiring writers might be jealous of Calvocoressi’s bio, Gorrell’s is more likely to sound all too familiar: “Brandon Scott Gorrell has been widely published on the internet.”

Nervous Breakdown belongs to a new-ish genre that might be called Internet Poetry, or Gmail Confessionalism, or Facebook Lyricism, or some combination of all of those things. The collection is published by MuuMuu House, a new small press helmed by the prankster poet and fiction writer Two Lin, whose own books have titles like Shoplifting from American Apparel, You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am, and Today The Sky is Blue and White with Bright Blue Spots and a Small Pale Moon and I Will Destroy Our Relationship Today. Although Lin’s persona as a smart aleck-y, chit-chatty writer can come across as abrasive, he’s a genuinely smart and funny writer and his dedication to small press publishing is not a joke. MuuMuu House is a relatively new venture; as of this writing, it’s only published two titles, but more seem to be on the way. For the most part, the poets published by Lin’s presses  -- he runs at least three of them -- have a lot in common with his own style of writing, and I found some reminders of Lin’s poems in Gorrell’s. There’s nothing wrong with this: writer-publishers will of course be attracted to work that’s kin to their own and it can even give a publishing house the same familial feeling as a favorite independent record label.

While the cover of Apocalyptic Swing shows a closeup of a boxer’s taped fist: a literal photo that depicts something about the contents, Gorrell’s book has an abstract neon green starburst design. Inside this starburst are the words “anxiety”, “low self esteem” and “alienation” written like a motif from an 80s infomercial. While I realize that authors rarely have input into their own book designs, this image in many ways represents exactly what’s inside. These are poems that convey emotions and ideas in bursts, like short spats of furious typing. In fact, many of them sound exactly like that. Take the poem “gmail”:

     I have urges not to check my email for a week so that when I
     finally check it I can feel at least a minute or a minute and
     a half of extreme excitement
     I have gotten adrenaline rushes from situations like finding
     eight new emails

That’s the whole poem and that’s probably a good thing because there’s no logical place for it to go from there. God, Mother, Etc. it ain’t, but there’s something emotionally familiar about it for many of us to be sure. Whether or not this kind of poetry can sustain one’s interest for an entire collection is, I suppose, up to the taste of the reader.

Gorrell’s is not a poetry of sophisticated diction, elevated thinking, or abstract concepts. If anything, the overarching theme here is of alienation through technology. The poems often fall back on talking about the speaker’s email, his blog, his loneliness, his alienation from others, returning to his email, his blog, and so on. It’s a book of cycles where the solution to emotional crises, depression and alienation keeps getting sought out online but is never quite found.