Death Egg by Nathaniel Duggan

Take everything you’ve read online about Nathaniel Duggan’s Death Egg (Back Patio Press, 2023) and print it off, laminate it, and use it to line anything you have in your community that needs some solid, waterproof, yet paper thin and poetic walls.

That’s because if – like me – you’ve heard anything about Death Egg by Nathaniel Duggan, what you’ve probably heard has been positive.

The bad news, poetry fans, is that I’m here to tell you that rather than that praise, those comments, that that that that verbiage (yes, I’m back in Toronto for a week so the local linguistic flourishes are squirting out of my lil English fingers once again (in England we say “words” not “verbiage”)) being absolute trash, bunkum, nonsense, you can dismiss as you can dismiss a good majority of all the praise for any literature you ever hear online, this is a moment when the praise is justified. Is appropriate. Is fair.

Is Death Egg by Nathaniel Duggan the best poetry I have ever read? No. Is it the best poetry I’ve ever read that’s published by Back Patio Press? No (sorry, Nathaniel, but this isn’t quite as good as Liver Mush and I don’t think anyone would benefit from me claiming otherwise). But is it good, tho? Yes. Yes it is. I’d say that it’s very very very very very very good. Poetry.

It’s writing that is direct, that is engaged, that is unpretentious, that is – the crucial thing imo – fricking (that’s North American for “fucking” or possibly “frigging” (hands)) human.

Humane.

Alive, innit.

Feelings and meanings and all that crucial fucking stuff that poetry needs to be but very very very very very often isn’t.

Vulnerability, humour, effacement, a blunt sense of honesty and wit yet no bullshit self-aggrandisement or mythologising…

Good words, innit, in good orders.

Some examples follow:

p. 6: “Baby come on over I have / an unlimited capacity for failure”

p. 9: “I arrive at weddings univited, / I walk at wayward angles, / I will appear alarming to you / and talk too loudly about politics / until you go away / and I will have an excuse / for everything I do not have.”

p. 42: “a forbidden handjob wracks / the high school reunion […] a certain angle of regret, / the way the light falls / from an open fridge / while to wonder / what’s left to eat.”

p. 39: “you had the best ass in a shady bar”

p. 49: “IN A DIRECT FIGHT I WOULD CURL UP IN A BALL LIKE AN ARMADILLO, EXCEPT I DON’T HAVE A PROTECTIVE SHELL, SO YOU WOULD STILL END UP BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF ME”

p. 62: “what you mistook / for the sky’s collapsing / was just another dusk.”

p. 74: “I often mistake bowel quivers for love […] What are you if not the shore / upon which I may finally crash, / take stock of myself, and formulate / a world worth worshipping.”

All of it fucking gorgeous and witty and articulate and direct and engaging and enervating and ALIVE

And there’s more and there’s more and there’s so much more I underlined or highlighted (not literally, I don’t carry highlighters or (most of the time) pens) with the intention to return to…

I can’t type them all in as my life is running away from me and the time spent typing that up is time spent not doing…

I mean I wouldn’t be doing anything good instead, but I would be not looking at my phone and looking at a book I’ve already read and could instead be looking at a book I hadn’t read or looking at my phone while doing something unrelated to reading books or something… I don’t know…

I mean what I basically mean is that I like indicated to myself that like most of the poems in this book were like poetic highlights. Which is too much to copy out. Too much to replicate, for my purposes innit, but that’s because this is actually an exxxxxccellent collection of poetry and that heady percentile of greatness means a a a a a

I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Sorry.

–///–

A couple of pieces I thought were so good I should include the whole thing:

p. 67:

p. 30:

I also loved ‘ASTRONAUT ON AN UNSPECIFIED MISSION’, ‘HAMSTER HEAVEN’ (which repeats the phrase “biblically-accurate” to great effect)…

And many many more. Too many more. Like loads more.

This is a very good book.

–///–

Right tho what’s the the the the the next point???

Eurgh.

Alas, though, ultimately this book does mayyyybe suffer due to comparisons with its stablemate (that means same publisher) Liver Mush, which is one of the best – and most surprisingly brilliant, which is potentially why it hits so hard – books of poetry I’ve read in the last few years…

This is a similar style or type of poetry to Liver Mush (and, let’s be fucking frank and acknowledge some fucking blogger bias here, to my 2018 critically noticed poetry collection Bad Boy Poet (Open Pen)), so this is definitely my kinda thing.

And I liked this a lot. I might even say that I loved it, but admitting to love affords a moment of vulnerability, so that’s probably something that is a risky, a dangerous, an unhelpful thing to do.

It’s great.

Believe the buzz.

Read Death Egg and become one of the bastards like me who raves about Death Egg online. Yayayayaya.

It’s very good.

Join us.

I think it’s best ordered from Amazon, but please advise me otherwise in the comments below if there are ways to get hold of this without enriching the already unnecessarily enriched.

Wait, I was wrong – you can order direct from Back Patio here tho that might only be valid for North America, I dunno???

Thank you again Back Patio Press!!!