Mean

Reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everday life can turn out to be very real indeed. This book exposes how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history.

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Three Days of the Condor. Because he takes Kathy Hale. Ties her up. He's in the CIA. Someone's trying to kill him. He needs time to sort things out. You'd think she'd panic more, but she doesn't. Would give anything to be spared having to go to the mountains where the boyfriend, Ben, is waiting in Vermont. He's nothing now that she's sleeping next to Joe Turner, who's just threatened her. He needs some shut eye. And the night is still young. She's less interested in running. When the guy dressed as a mailman goes after Turner, Hale gets in on the action. Finds a carving knife. That's her man. Blond hair and sweatered.A Doxa sharkhunter watch. Under the umbrella of his drama, she never notices her hands are still bound. Forgets to ask to be released. She'll help him. However she can. I'm no Kathy Hale, but I love bookish Joe Turner. And not because he's got an exciting life. But because he'll erase mine and make me the 'ol spyfucker he can count on. A kind of prisoner to something larger. After years together, he'd still ask me: do you know anybody that well?In the appropriately titled "Mean", Colette LaBouff Atkinson's speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged exhusbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn't leave you alone.
Managing to 'say' what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, "Mean" lays bare the darkness within the narrator's heart as well as in ours.