Liner Notes

Poetry. Andy Mister's LINER NOTES is a semi-narrative prose poem, a meditation on alienation and pop culture. Beginning with the Beach Boy's unfinished masterpiece "Smile," Mister describes a world populated by ghosts. Adrift on a sea of drug use, boredom and popular entertainment, Mister traces his relationship to the obsessive collection of ephemera and the coterminous feelings of isolation and loss. Like an iPod on shuffle, lyrical descriptions of urban landscapes and memories of failed relationships mix with song lyrics and deadpan anecdotes of death, failure. In the end a life, like the book itself, is assembled from the detritus of pop culture. As he writes, "Each billboard is a monument to our ability to believe in anything, at least for a moment. Then it's gone." But belief's shadow remains, amid the news of a world shot full of holes, which LINER NOTES' hauntings seem to delineate like the chalk figure at the center of every homicide scene we've ever imagined ourselves appearing within.... "There'll probably be some music there, lining your eyelids."