Review by Stephen Fellner
FORTY-NINE GUARANTEED WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH
by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press
P.O. Box 206
East Rockaway, NY 11518-0206
ISBN 978-0-9792416-1-1
2007, 86 pp., $15.00
www.marshhawkpress.org
Unlike a lot of comic poets who rely on easy punchlines and hermetic in-jokes, Sandy McIntosh balances verbal inventiveness with significant personal inquiries in his third collection of poems Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death.
Playful with form and content, McIntosh’s infectious humorous spirit reveals itself almost immediately in the title poem:
5. Joseph Heller’s character, Yossarian cultivated boredom to prolong his life. The actor, George Saunders’ suicide note read: “I am bored.”
Or look a little further down the list:
7. A lesson from Scientific American, 1980: “We used to believe in the particle theory [of light], but now we believe in the wave theory, because all who believed in the particle theory have died.”
