Amazon Reviews x 3
Sean Lovelace
The Stick Soldiers (New Poets of America), paperback—April 2, 2013 by Hugh Martin (Author), Cornelius Eady (Foreword)
 $15.81
Not a Toy!
★★★★☆
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2024
Verified Purchase
“I told you don’t drink and shop online,” she said. “Remember when you bought the doll pillows off eBay? Or the 5-foot-tall Sherlock Holmes?” She was right. I think I was caught (or trapped?) in nostalgia or maybe red wine and kiwi-flavored melatonin: the walls shook and the ceiling was perhaps green and my fingers were dancing for the Holy Dollar, Amen, cha-ching. As Mick Jagger once sang, “You wonder who killed the mallllll, when after allllll it was all of y’all.“ She claimed I spoke in tongues but I believe I was just mumbling my credit card number.
Warning! This is not plastic soldiers from childhood. (I always painted them different colors and made them marry each other and sometimes blew them up with firecrackers. One time I built them a “burn unit hospital” out of a shoebox but then I set the burn unit on fire with an M-80. Sorry. This was before child therapy or even seatbelts were invented.)
This is POETRY! I know because the words don’t go right. And they don’t even read to the end of the page. SO much empty page. (You can use this Stick Soldiers for a napkin, coaster, or to-do list quite nicely.) And sometimes the words
just STOP LIKE
THIS.
Huh?
In college I accidentally walked into a POETRY reading while looking for the Pokémon Trainer Startup Club, Southside Chapter, Muncie (logo is a pit Snubbull eating a McDonald’s apple pie) and was too embarrassed to leave so sat in the back and watched the POET. She moved her arms like painting shadows or maybe had something stuck/a seizure? She had eyeglasses the color of blood. She said TENDRILS. POMEGRANATE. She really liked the MOON. Sometimes she told a story longer than the POEM!
Three or maybe four people were there and the POET seemed happy then sad then happy then sad, then at the end sold a book to a girl with cotton candy hair, and then I left and got free pizza from the Rec Center.
“Just send it back. It’s Amazon,” she said. But I didn’t send it back. I had already mussed some pages with hot sauce.
Anyway, this is a good product. Some of the words stuck (or moved?) in my head. I don’t know how or why.
Amazon Basics Slime Activator Solution 1 QT (946ml), Baking Soda, Transparent
 $10.97
Activation: A Fable
★★★★☆
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2025
Verified Purchase
One afternoon outside Bozeman, Montana, a big wolf waited in a fire-scorched forest for a little girl (she was the daughter of a Hollywood film producer) to come along carrying a basket of avocados, Nutella, and diet Dr. Pepper to her grandmother. Finally, a little girl did come along and she was carrying a Versace basket made of sea turtle leather. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So, the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl said over by the pickleball courts, and the wolf disappeared into the wood.
When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house, she saw that there was somebody in bed wearing a nightcap and watching Alone, Season 10, on Netflix. “Who is winning?” she asked her grandmother/nightcap person. “I don’t know yet,” the wolf replied. “But several players are expending way too many calories building elaborate shelters when they should be procuring food.” The little girl nodded—a classic Alone blunder.
She had approached no nearer than 14 feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than Donald Trump looks like Selena Gomez. The little girl took out some SLIME, activated it, and SLIMED the wolf dead.
Moral: This is a good product.
A Flag for Sunrise, paperback—March 10, 1992, by Robert Stone (Author)
 $17.95
Ahoy Mate!
★★★★☆
Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2024
Verified Purchase
I thought this was a pirate flag, the skull and bones, Jolly Roger, etc. It is not. (I was going to hang the flag above my birdfeeder to scare off the neighbor’s dog—it eats everything in my backyard, including my garden tomatoes, my shoes, my bird seed.) In North Carolina? I 1.) Tumbled off a capsized catamaran into a swarm of 10,000 jellyfish. 2.) Watched old men catch baby blue sharks and toss them onto the fishing pier to dry out and die in the sun. I threw them all back into the sea. And the men turned red and screamed, “Get the fuck outta here, kid!” 3.) Lived with my uncle out of the back of an old Chevy pickup truck. Stealing cigarettes off campground picnic tables, eating clams and crabs we tugged up from the Sound, spending all day in the ocean: we’d swim out to these crazy slipping/sliding sandbars and they would whhoooooossshh us down the shoreline, the beach purring by in a gigantic slurping rush of sand and silt and shells.
That, dear reader, was a riptide, but we didn’t have a care for it and no adult to ruin the day with grimaces and yelps: one person’s riptide is another person’s magic carpet ride. Also, the other way. Ah, memory, you sketchy friend and foe. Hard times? No. Hard times involve cold rooms, odd beeping sounds, lies, and too much paperwork …
This book is a good product, dense. 448 pages. About eight minutes ago I bounced it off the head of my neighbor’s dog. Fun fact! To catch a dinner of clams all you need is a simple garden rake. Fun fact! To survive a riptide, let go. Fun fact! Not all pirate flags had a skull and bones. Some simply had an hourglass; some said, “Right now. Is the end of time.”
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