Night School: Selected Early Poems

Glen Armstrong

ISBN: 978-93-95224-14-7

Copyright 2022, Cyberwit

Reviewed by LB Sedlacek

          Glen Armstrong has created something very real in this new poetry collection.  His writing is passionate, but at the same time it is also comforting.

          The poems are mostly free verse with some more formal.  And the book is presented in four distinctly laid out sections.

          He begins the book with a coming of age poem and from there goes into poems about such things as meditation, a tool and dye shop, tattoos, black coffee and Garrison Keillor just to name a few.  The subjects may seem diverse but the book meshes well together as a whole. 

          His poems seem like a world unto themselves as it is easy to get lost in each one.  That is the sign of a good poem when you don’t want it to end.

From “The Girl Who Liked Scary Movies”:

She was seven when I was twelve.
She was clever when I was water.
She took baths when I took showers.
She was X when I was the Science Patrol.
Her green Crayola was the one she loved best,
the one that ran away from her the quickest.
Godzilla was green and Frankenstein
and most of the rest of what she drew
had a jagged green outline to signify
the otherworldly:
 

A top-hatted granddad
with a knife and one eye.
An undead parakeet.

An army of radioactive boyfriends.                   

Armstrong’s writing is clever.  He crafts poems that move at the proper speed for each one.  He isn’t afraid to altar his writing to defy the status quo and instead exemplify his own unique voice.  Each poem is complex, but each poem is also able to reach any type of poetry reader so that the pages keep turning.

What Armstrong has done with this book is admirable.  He succeeds in capturing his own style using crisp lines to deepen each poem.

“Night School:  Selected Early Poems” is like a beautiful or surreal or whatever kind of art you like portrait of poems.  It has all the right ingredients:  subject, voice, lines, and spaces which are combined into the perfect recipe of poetry.

~LB Sedlacek is the author of “I’m No Robot,” “The Poet Next Door,” “Simultaneous Submissions,” “Four Thieves of Vinegar & Other Short Stories,” and “The Blue Eyed Side.”