Self-Vending, by Ethan Palmer

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In Self-Vending, Ethan Palmer becomes a machine of confession and misdirection, dispensing memories, dreams, and thoughtful oddities like miscellaneous brain snacks factory-sealed behind plexiglass. This collection functions as an earnest homage to the struggle of self-promotion, where each poem delivers a heavily processed and often unhealthy aspect of the poet’s own mechanized and poorly-maintained sense of self. While the poet bangs his head against a cosmic mirror in a futile effort to jolt loose the truth that dangles on a hook, just out of reach, a genuine love for the absurd leaks onto everything inside, ensuring a beautiful, albeit messy, treat.

Self-Vending is a menagerie of indulgences, vulnerabilities, and heart-felt cynicisms that teeters in a meditative flux of self sabotaging self-promotion that is at times both perverted and divine. Bizarre voices thunder paradoxical sermons that praise doom and dandelions, spiny lobsters and uneaten figs. Imagined futures traverse a graffitied, urine soaked cosmos of makeout fantasies and reinvented mythos to recollect and reminisce in fleeting, static blips the countless things inevitably lost along the way. Lyrical, subversive, and affectionate, these poems explore a multitude of pretty peculiarities, each of which is packed with its own unique flavors that will linger long after each one is sampled.

Ethan Palmer’s poetry has appeared in East Tennessee State University’s Mockingbird Magazine, Pif Magazine, The Offbeat, The Philosophical Idiot, and The Pigeon Parade Quarterly, and a plethora of obscure nooks and crannies online. He lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he hosted the Electric Pheasant Open Mic Poetry event for five wild years. He currently teaches high school English language learners in a small town and is collaborating with a dear friend to create the story and music for an upcoming indie video game.