WANT: POEMS
by A. J. Rathbun
(Zyzzyva) $9.95

In the wake of recent evidence suggesting that Mozart was killed by trichinosis contracted from a poorly cooked sausage and not, in fact, by heartbreak or poverty, the romance of an emotion like want may seem outmoded. Seattle poet A. J. Rathbun, however, tracks want through crowded shelves of Epsom salt, tattooed strongmen, and cooped-up metaphor. He springs on it with the choked throat of the language-ravenous. The result is a collection that swells the heart, dropping phrases like rain to engorge the reader's aorta.

A poem that begins, "In a cardinal-colored Mustang/L. cups my face in her hands/that feel like wet moss," ends, "Every/ relationship I had begins and ends/wet. L.'s car is dry by August's end." Rathbun, who also edits the local magazine LitRag, understands juxtaposition--but also when not to stretch a metaphor. The poem "Equal Worth" begins with the pseudo-aphorism, "It's rare to see the leaf drop,/but normal to walk over ten/times ten each fall day, brown," and moves smoothly to Chopin, a lover breaking a knee.

Some of the poems in Want have a Frank O'Hara-like narrative causality, but instead of New York they're set in Seattle or Topeka or Chicago, which places them in the small-city category of want. The result is crisp with the details of longing that, in a big town, go unobserved. TRACI VOGEL


FARGO ROCK CITY: A HEAVY METAL ODYSSEY IN RURAL NORTH DAKOTA
by Chuck Klosterman
(Scribner) $23

Even if an author could convince you that Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil had a far-reaching impact on the psyche of teenage Middle America in the '80s, what worth would such a thesis have other than the sick satisfaction of validating Jesse Helms' worst fears? Surprisingly, Chuck Klosterman's explorations of the Crüe's yelling match with Satan (and other ponderations such as, "Why is the use of keyboards the Roe v Wade of heavy metal?" and "What are the parallels between GN'R Lies and the four Gospels?") are more worthwhile than you might think, and just as pee-in-your-spandex-pants-funny as you would hope.

Klosterman clearly knows as much about Grandaddy as he does about Guns N' Roses, but this melding of memoir and critical deconstruction is far from an ironic, hipper-than-thou nostalgia trip. He shows some astonishingly bad taste (perplexingly placing Tesla several rungs higher than Judas Priest on his ultra-unorthodox "best of" scale), but is virtually shameless in his defense of the Bon Jovis of the world. In trotting out gleeful, occasionally cerebral dissections of videos, interviews, and personas with all the intellectual charisma of a corn-fed Robert Christgau, Klosterman comes admirably close to making a case for giving the much-maligned genre its day in critical court. HANNAH LEVIN


GOLD FOOLS
by Gilbert Sorrentino
(Green Integer) $14.95

Why would anyone write a novel in which every sentence is a question? What's it like to read such a book? But then, isn't the act of reading a kind of inquiry, where the reader asks what the words mean, where the sentences are leading, who the characters are, and other questions about the subject while being distracted by questions about all sorts of extraneous stuff?

What's the story? Is Gilbert Sorrentino just jerking off when he applies a technique such as this to tell the story of three young cowpunchers and two older saddle tramps who set out to find a gold mine in the desert? What if the novel in question is a send-up of a boys' adventure novel, a Western replete with renderings of pulp-fiction wrangler diction (What in sam hill, goldurnit!) and a text thoroughly corrupted by the author's willfully deviant anachronisms, allusions, and other literary asides? Doesn't this seem like an apt way to deal with a genre that flaunts the cliffhanger ending, always goading the reader into wondering what will happen next? When all is interrogative and nothing is declared, what, after all, does happen?

Shouldn't art be more meaningful, more grounded in Great Themes? More personal?

Is it possible for anything created by a person to be absolutely impersonal?

What about a review? This review? Is it even possible for this brief review to convey the experience of going through that entire novel?

Is the novel too long? Wouldn't it be just like some pencil-pecker short-story fetishist to whine that Sorrentino might have achieved his effect in 15 pages? Just because the guy has a little fun with a form, cracking jokes and mimicking hayseeds in the course of drawing attention to some fundamental concerns about the nature of the relationship between readers and writers, is that any reason to treat him like a minor novelist?

Who's a major novelist, anyway? Updike? Roth? Sontag? What did Sontag ever write that anyone should call a novel? Who knows anything? David Foster Wallace, who remarked in Salon, no less, that David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress was pretty much the high point of avant-garde American writing? What is it about that name? If Sorrentino had called his big book Wittgenstein Stew, what would Wallace have to say? DOUG NUFER