PINOCCHIO GONE LIMP
86p. Perfect bound. First Edition. 5"x7"

'Too successfully policed & so I have disappeared to we.  Given a title & so we have taken them all.  Us having tunneled with the shovel of I in guerrilla action. Across the bow!'

A collection of poetry composed of old forgeries and poorly worn masks by Matthew Whitley.  The book opens with the striptease biometrics of the “authentic” poet, Matthew Whitley: his fingerprints, date of birth, social security number, and signature.  Next, the curtain slowly rises to reveal multiple aestheticized folds of personality, exposed yet disguised under the make-up of four pseudonyms.

They are arranged into a small parade of such wooden boys: militants, pompous poets, mystics of sorts, all brimming with bravura, ideological zeal and adolescent posturing; epaulets gleaming in the sun – a military jacket thrown over bony rachitic shoulders. These pre-programmed characters gain dimension precisely through insistence on their lines.  They lean on the awkward support of an exoskeleton composed of what Bakhtin would describe as the “word of another” – external language of bureaucracy, mysticism, ideology – yet Whitley manages to impart to them the urgency and vulnerability of a living heart.  Theirs is a real virtue born out of home-cooked self-aggrandizement.