His short collection Small Matters and novel Winter's Heart both thrive on the edges of the fantasy world we can see just starting to emerge here. He clearly always had an interest in the fantastic and the surreal. Kanuckel pokes at himself with a self-conscious forward and title that ask us to see through all the bs but there's still some real value to lot of these poems. Such a perspective is laced with self-consciousness and a strange sort of nostalgia. Looking back on this form of poetry is a strange thing because we can remember thinking how important and truthful it all felt then and now we see all the bits that stopped being so important to us as we became adults. We wanted to show the world how it was supposed to be but didn't really even know how to put it into words. We were standing up for women's rights, gay rights and the right to wallow in our own sense of importance. The truth is that the 90s was a very confusing time. We lived the grunge and alternative era and took on personal explorations of older stuff from the 60s like The Doors (let's not forget Jim's poetry), Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix and the punk groups that inspired heroes like Kurt Cobain.
The gen-xers before us were being written off as a wasted generation of slackers but the music they were making, the films they played a part in and so many other bits of pop culture really spoke to the part of us that was trying to become an individual. We wrote this stuff because we really wanted to figure out what we were supposed to be doing with our lives. This is where us now all too grown up 90s kids come in. Unable or unwilling to blurt this stuff out to our equally disgruntled and emotional peers (or the popular types we pit ourselves against in our heads everyday) we then find ourselves using poetry to get it out of our systems. The trouble is that at that age we also really don't want to talk about it with anyone we see as an authority figure and we tend to see ourselves as our own sort of mini fiefdoms, lost islands where only our truth is the real one. As teens we all struggle with self expression, identity, social conformity and the very loaded minefield of relationships. The poetry actually winds up acting as a nice little snapshot of teenage life and the thought processes involved with being "that age". The teens who are still struggling through the angst, loneliness and anxiety of being a young adult and the folks who were teens in the 90s and writing just this kind of poetry themselves.
There two groups of people who are really going to get this book.
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