She's My Best Friend

Book excerpt: Poetry. Jim Behrle "has written a great book of poetry. . .Perhaps it's more like souvenirs from this megalomaniacal persona's adventures in mass culture. . .It's a cliche to talk about how in collage there is a tension between the original context of the collaged materials and the art piece. But I think Jimmy uses that tension incredibly well. It's not so much a tension between an original context and a poem as between a total commodity culture and a persona adrift in that culture - the persona is to such a large extent created by this culture (the sexual bragging, the stalking, the masturbating) but the persona still has enough autonomy to muck things up"-Johannes Goransson, coeditor of Action Books. Jim Behrle's poems have appeared most recently in Cannibal and The Tiny. Behrle lives in Brooklyn, NY.