“Narrative Noir”: A Review of John Gartland’s Resurrection Room: Bangkok dark rhetoric
(Lizardville Productions, 2016) “One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster/The bars are temples but the pearls ain't free’You'll find a god in every golden cloister/And if you're lucky then the god's a she/I can feel an angel sliding up to me” (“One Night in Bangkok,” Chess ) There are cities in the world that pulse with a deep mystique: the sleepless dichotomies of New York; the romanticism of Paris for lover and writers; the foggy Victorian mystery of London… the list goes on and on. Bangkok (Thailand) conjures images of crowded streets full of steaming food, rickshaw drivers, and exotic women finger-motioning from alleyways and doorways… and Resurrection Room takes these images wider and deeper than perhaps your average reader wants to go. Which makes it essential reading. Gartland—a true Renaissance man known in writers’ circles as the “Poet Noir”—pulls no punches. In his several books of poetry, his misericordia-sharp Facebook posts, and his...