The Gorko Gazette

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thegorkogazette

2.16.2025 12:40 PM

All you want (a series of lies) by Colin Gee

ALL YOU WANT (A SERIES OF LIES)
by colin gee, 138 pages
Stone Corpse Press, $10 paperback

ABOUT

Between adobe walls in the land of blue agave there is a flash in the pan, but it is just the pork fat catching fire on the hob, the sugar and salt glinting on the rim of the glass, the beaded sweat falling from the moribund brow of the Bishop’s son, like a series of lies. A love letter to southern Mexico that mixes verse and prose, racing through a hundred years in an afternoon, All you want is a juxtaposition of passion and fury, sunlight and storm, things holy and profane, the true and the mendacious, a grotesque mimesis of the modern and the long dead.

While exhibiting a terse beauty, the pieces in All you want sprawl often in the melancholic, self-destructive and surreal. We are negotiating splits: splits via hybridity, splits in multilingual narration and dialect, a deconstruction of the domestic and the absurd, crackpot history, the culinary, the real and the real weird. And all of it, zapped in the narrator’s electric blender, mixed up with 5 shakes of Tabasco, fired out in morning cockamamie, and when the angels meet and crash – it’s sweet stuff.
-Tempest Miller, author of Gralloched: Boz Box and others.

This is Colin Gee at his best. With his appealing trademark style, Gee’s poetry glides across the reader’s imagination leaving contemplation and delight in its wake.
-Hugh Blanton, author of Kentucky Outlaw