The Disguise of Events
by Dennis Barone

ISBN: 0-9700663-3-3
Saddle-stitched, $5.00
Publication Date: Spring 2002
5.5 x 8.5 inches, 16 pages
(ISSN: 1527-9579, Volume 3, Number 1)
PROSE POETRY

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The Disguise of Events, by Dennis Barone, is part of Quale Press’s edition key satch(el) series of publications of prose poetry. In The Disguise of Events, a chaos of assorted experiences and references resolve themselves into a heap of strange voices and conundrums. Outsiders and critics chime in mercilessly like a rowdy crowd awaiting an execution; scenes stand in for other scenes in eclectic flashes—nymphs are forced to inhabit body after body—all as if to assert that “choice remains ever out of our control.”

“The sentences [in The Disguise of Events] link and make a puzzle or a map or a path in the wilderness, nevertheless a familiar wilderness turned strange.”
— Peter Ganick

“The quiet village where Barone lives with its tight-lipped locals and New England Decorum, seems a suitable palette from which to draw ruminations about half-meanings, truncated logic, and the deception of language.”
— Stacey Levine

From The Disguise of Events...

Smashup

A strategist of the flying wedge has encoded a peace offering conducive to the orchestration of events toward which we unhesitatingly gravitate. He cried, surmount your conqueror fetish, find a flat board for better leverage and hurdle all that sludge that’ll otherwise beset you.

Someone dislodged the doorstop before their disenchantment, before their formidable task of weighing down the trunks. Such an abrogation of the commonest courtesies could only inspire us to wonder if such an act were not analogous to a situation we would rather have left unnamed, untouched, unnoticed.

Others conspired against us. They wanted to take all that we were so disinclined to give. Our gold, such paucity, had no intrinsic value. It was only a fool’s gold, after all, and we tried to tell them so.

The others have called our friend’s new book an “aberration.” Soon after they set this libel afoot his mailbox became inundated with hate mail, the most salacious comments! The truth has been taxed, impounded even. We kept quiet all throughout the mad carousel of that exhausting, irrevocable week.

What he once volunteered to do has now been forced upon him. What had been impossible to do such a short time before has now been rendered not only possible but absolutely necessary and essential.

Quick, hand him that hammer.