The Takeaway Bin
Toni Mirosevich
ISBN 978-1-933132-81-5 $14.00 78 pages
Oblique Strategies is a card game invented in 1975, by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. “Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas” are printed on a pack of cards and offer a set of possibilities to apply “when a dilemma occurs in a working situation.” The Takeaway Bin borrows from that concept, presenting poems that reply to various daily dilemmas, specific or obscure.
The Takeaway Bin arises out of an ultramodern language aftermath: the fragments and shards of language we are currently left with in an age of verbal foreshortening, where Photoshop has imploded the failsafe idea that “seeing is believing,” and Wikipedia has shifted the idea of fact into the realm of a constantly updating consortium. This melee of reference points is the Takeaway Bin's fuel, and the profound plasticity of modern reality is the engine Mirosevich harnesses. --->LJ Moore, SF Examiner
With wit and canny wordplay, Toni Mirosevich eviscerates linguistic bromides, delivering poems that consistently surprise. A high-octane critique of contemporary culture emerges from her fearless take on the oddments and phrasing of idiomatic American discourse. In long-lined sonnets and jazzy improvisations, the speaker juggles a mix of colloquial and formal diction, learned and popular referents. Winning titles “Lie or Lay,” “Lucky Stiff,” “Old and In The Way,” may charm, but this poet knows “Our worst impulse has yet to be discovered.” A provocative intelligence powers these sizzling lyrics.
Robin Becker author of Domain of Perfect Affection
What a playful, incisive attitude The Takeaway Bin conveys. Our rituals of frailty and justification are wittily revealed. Since we are prone to “repeating the same folly again and again./ We might as well turn up the volume,/ and emphasive the obvious.” We hear phrases we know but begin to understand them differently, we see aspects of our lives we recognize, but learn to conceive of them in new ways. Toni Mirosevich knows, “If our interest goes below the surface plane then love will grow.” Like the goodies we find in a takeaway bin, these poems enticingly display what is too often carelessly tossed off by others.
Camille Dungy author of Suck on the Marrow and Smith Blue
Toni Mirosevich is the author of a book of nonfiction stores, Pink Harvest (Mid-List Press, First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award, 2007 Lambda Literary Award Finalist), three collections of poetry, My Oblique Stategies (Thorngate Road Press, Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award), Queer Street (Custom Words), The Rooms We Make Our Own (Firebrand Books) and co-author of Trio: Toni Mirosevich, Charlotte Muse, Edward Smallfield (Specter Press). Her multi-genre work has been anthologized in The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, Best American Travel Writing, The Gastronomica Reader, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, The Discovery of Poetry and has appeared in Kenyon Review, The Journal, Zyzzyva, Five Fingers Review, Puerto del Sol and other publications. She has been awarded fellowships with the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Espy Literary Foundation, was recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Lesbian Writer in Fiction Award, and has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and former Associate Director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives. She lives with her wife, Shotsy Faust, in Pacifica, California.
www.tonimirosevich.com