Poems of Frank Rupture

Peter Manson

“It’s typical of the narrative persona conveyed in much of Peter Manson’s previous work that “The Baffle Stage”, the second of the Poems of Frank Rupture, should offer a kind of pre-emptive piss-take of the compositional techniques underpinning the collection’s subsequent and most significant piece, “Sourdough Mutation”, defined as it is by verbal shuffling of the “rack/lack/cack” variety (though far more myriad and pleasurable).[...] On the one hand, the formal invention of this poetry occasionally seems powered by a veritable dynamo of masochism; on the other, and not unrelatedly, it’s often hilarious.[...] This is what “Sourdough Mutation” feels like to read: like someone has extracted the hypnagogic voices from your supine head and played them back to you, algorithmically shuffled into pleasing patterns of sound and shape. It’s an act of generous communication to allow a poem to speak a reader like this: to show them that the most primordial aspects of their cognition are shared and understood. It also seems like it could have been an indirectly rejuvenative process for the poetic voice itself. At the close of that creation sequence in “The Baffle Stage”, Manson offers an almost-potty-mouthed reworking of Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” – “I is this constellated cupid stunt” – which seems to get to the heart of the matter (8). The compositional logic may in essence be a logic of self-punishment – “I am a stupid cunt” – but embraced and played out in language, it yields a childlike, celestial play: a constellation of cupid stunts.”
- Greg Thomas

“The case of Peter Manson provides another handy example of canonical speciousness.[...] If we expect our poets to write out of an experientially defined self, to ‘find their voice’, and take the assault course of form by cranking out the odd villanelle, then Manson can only baffle and disappoint. Expecting him to do these things, however, I would suggest, is no more meaningful than expecting Webern to write ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. [... This] poetry is thrillingly of the present moment, and pregnant with possibility for anyone who cares to absorb it. I have seen the future and it (still) works."
- David Wheatley