Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea:  Poems by Leopold McGinnis, is just one of many fine titles published by AU Press as part of their Mingling Voices series; a series that “aims to promote authors who challenge traditions and cultural stereotypes” and is “designed to reach a wide variety of readers, both generalists and specialists.”  That said, being a University student you have an obligation, or at least an excuse, to challenge traditions and stereotypes and, since the collection was chosen specifically for its accessibility to a wide readership there is no reason why you should fear picking it up and giving it a shot…even if it is poetry and even if you aren’t an English major.

This collection caught my eye because the title immediately reminded me of the great literary classic, James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl.  My curiosity was piqued and I wanted to find out if any of the poems would reference this personal childhood favorite.  None of them did, or at least I don’t think they did, but, what I can say is that both books share the common theme of trying to find a safe place to land in a noisy, senseless world, and both do so in a very funny and whimsical way.

What makes this collection so accessible is that it is written in a narrative style that really blurs the line between poetry and narrative fiction.  In fact, if the poems appeared on the page and were punctuated in a traditional way, they could work equally well as short stories.  There is something to be said, though, about using the poetic form to force the reader to pay attention to specific words and phrases on the page.  I also find that poetry puts me in a frame of mind to peel back layers of meaning that I might miss while skimming through a short story.

Visually, the poems are long and lean, the lines short and succinct, speeding the pace of the reading so that each poem feels like a mind dump of the narrators’ experiences.  Reading them aloud, I was reminded of the way my four-year-old blurts out his dreams in one long sentence without taking a breath so that he can get the whole story out before he forgets any of it.  Just like a dream, McGinnis’ poems make sense and don’t make sense all at the same time, blurring real memory from fiction and the concrete from the abstract.  They question why we are here, what we are doing here, and whether or not we really want to find out the answers to those questions.  For that matter, the poems question why we strive to find the answers at all.

The poems, on their own, are wonderful, whimsical, self-contained stories that, as a collection, take on even greater depth of meaning.  You may not think that there is cohesiveness in a collection of poems that cover such a range of subject matter, from Greek gods to Robert Frost to a Sultan’s obsession to a Mexican wrestler to Ghandi to giant Japanese-school-girl-loving-robots but, strangely enough, there is.  As McGinnis points out in the preface to his work, “What good is a giant robot if you can’t combine that giant robot with six other giant robots to create a super giant robot?”  Seriously, who can argue with that?

Zeus and the Giant Iced Tea is available at all fine bookstores in print form but, if I have yet to convince you to invest in a bit of poetry, the e-book is available as a free download on the AU Press website.