Review of The Liberator by Justin Lacour

In Frederick Pollack’s poetry, lofty thoughts of Nietzsche, Marx, and Spengler hang with a cast of robots, cults, milfs, and gym-rats.  But The Liberator isn’t interested in simple name-dropping or some modernist project of mixing high/low culture.  Rather, Pollack is relying on a wealth of reading and observation to take a macro view of the world.  In his poems, the reader gets to see the poet thinking through the problems of being human with wit and insight.

Some of the poems in The Liberator have an almost anthropological feel, such “Figurine,” as Pollack constructs the genesis of an alternate society: