|
|
 |
|
The characters in The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut are tethered to a world by the pink umbilical cord tightened around the neck of a newborn. The birthplace is prison. The damned angel of the military and corporate flies above. She is a sky pilot releasing witless seed over the earth. The anti-capital-punishment/anti-war thread shows its terror and absurdity. The novel is set in a time and place where being born is a form of capital punishment. Ben Cocoa, the lead, is punished for being workingclass, tracked in a public school and marked a special student with low intelligence. Nothing can save him. The school called him a juvenile delinquent. The military calls him a bullet-catcher. Neighbors nickname him T. Rex. On a Sunday, he is arrested for smoking weed behind a dairy. He’s given a choice: join the Army or prison. He joins the Army but refuses to go to Vietnam, drops chocolate mescaline, slips on ice in front of a bowling alley and breaks his neck. He goes AWOL. He’s arrested while dancing at what he calls Viagra Falls. They drive him to a small prison in a small Ohio town. The fingerprints he tried to burn out of the golden snap of his thumb identify him as one of the thieves who broke into the root cellar of the Pentagon and defused atomic bombs. He was given a ten-year sentence until he beheaded a prison guard who called his father a motherfucker. He’s placed inside an iron lung on death row. The state argues the method of execution. Can they electrify the iron lung? Can they attach a hose and spew poison gas into the lung? Can they drown him by filling it with ice water? Can they have a firing squad fire hollow point bullets into it? Can they use a guillotine? Ben’s head sticks out like a small hungry bird.
Praise for Charles Fort’s previous publications:
“Charles Fort has found an utterly precise and moving idiom for things large and small, ones that would – before Mrs. Belladonna’s Supper Club Waltz — have seemed beyond expression.
He is matchless.”
— Sydney Lea
“In deconstructing the great patchwork quilt that is American culture, Fort undermines any notion of the Other while understanding all too well the reality of it. His poems are jazzy riffs through Fourth ofJuly bombast, Native American lore, Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the detritus of a post-war materialism.”
— David Soucy
“. . . consistently interesting — often luminous poetry.”
— Harold Broadkey on The Town Clock Burning (New York Times Book Review)
“No review an adequately praise the poetic and moral victory of this collection...the refusal to assume easy answers or to merely express hate, and the difficult, earned humility of “Race War” are testaments to Fort’s power’s as a poet...it is a speech-act of authenticity and integrity...I’m also struck here by how the poem’s allusion and borrowing form Tennyson work so naturally, the sonority of Fort’s language throughout this poem, and elsewhere in the collection is worthy of comparison to Tennyson.”
— Ken Shedd (Mid-American Review)
|
|
|
|
From The Last Black Hippie in Connecticut...
Prologue #2
What happened here once happened to the world. The warden walked into the death chamber followed by the executioner he watched tighten the leather strap borrowed from Bob’s Barber Shop given by the inmate’s father who received the shop rather than a blind blue mule. Ben Cocoa was scheduled for the firing squad on New Year’s Eve. Leap years had prevented his execution for a decade. Ben was given several choices for his death. Electric Chair. Gas Chamber. Lethal Injection. Whipping Post. Horse Drawn and Quartered. Boiled in Three-in-One Oil, Robotic Firing Squad, and one revealed by the C.I.A. and Pentagon: A.I. A.I. was Ben’s final choice. He was lifted and placed inside a discarded iron lung found at a junkyard scrapheap, a pyramid of poison pointing to auroral activity, filled high with Ovaltine and Fluffernutter jars, car tires, clothes pins, yellowed pages, and a Slinky. A.I. was Ben’s
final choice. It designed the iron lung equipped with a black rotary phone used by Wallace Stevens, a rear-view mirror, two portholes, hourglass, sun roof, space heater, license plate, embossed with Ben Cocoa, Jr., War Hero, made by his fellow inmates on his last birthday. They had tried the gas chamber and lethal injection on Ben when he turned 18. Those methods left Ben paralyzed from his neck to his toes. One of his eyes popped out of its socket into a glass of water the warden held in case Ben experienced dry mouth before the lever was pulled. The gas chamber shriveled his veins and decreased his height by four and a half inches. The lethal injection was attempted seven times and stopped after the M.D. deemed the eye in the glass that stared at him too cruel too
unusual at lunch time. Suggested by A.I., the iron lung was shot into outer space on the latest X rocket with no return address. Ben was set to float forever. The warden did not tell Ben that the iron lung was electrified by NASA scientists in case he tried to escape...
|
© Quale Press LLC, 2025. Receive information on Quale Press books.
Terms for Booksellers.
|
|
|
