No Forwarding Address

by Natalie Jacobson (2.13.61, $11.00, 190 pp.)
by Thomas Christian

Val and Doyle are two friends occupying the alternative universe of poet/prose-ist Natalie Jacobson’s downtown New York streets of the early 1980s. The dual celebrants hail from different cultures – In Val’s world of downtown bars and pizzerias, the heroes wear leather jackets and dance to metal-clang guitars in the fireballs of doom; Dope beckons and swoons, restlessly amid the scarred walls of the crumbling architecture and providing claustrophobian comforts among “sputtering street lights, sewers clogged with used tampons aid fetuses, (and) sidewalks littered with human garbage.”

Doyle was raised behind white picket fences, manicured lawns, and the promise of happy dreams forevermore to suburban cogs that click and turn in tune with the great MACHINE.

Together, with pets “Mandrax” and “Agamemnon,” they fuse their nerve endings with broken beer bottles and cauterize wounds with the wiry rims of hidden angels wings, seeking to fill the void that the other provides in the downtown battle zone of the tattoo’d city.