Joel Allegretti's Platypus presents the reader with, among other treats, a cento meant to be in the voice of Victor Frankenstein, a ghazal composed of the generic names of psychotropic drugs, and a tribute to the thirty-three villains from the 1960s Batman TV series. Featuring poems, short stories, Fluxus-inspired instruction pieces, and even text art, Platypus is a hybrid work named after the ultimate hybrid animal. |
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Concrete elastic. Perf lyric. Narrative and found. Allegretti makes the rounds in Platypus, a show-off with a mission to launch poetry multidimensionally in a rocketing time machine. Finally, poetry as natural as an egg-laying mammal with a bill and a quill!
—Bob Holman
This tribrid's eponym is aptly named, for one cannot imagine its existence a priori. Allegretti's conceptual forays are not only exceptionally honed and finely wrought, but generously hilarious. In homage to that egg-laying mammal whose mammaries are stripped of nipples, this genre-busting annotated romp manages to give plenty of lyrical suck.
—Timothy Liu
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