Review of McGimpsey's Sitcom

Here's a thorough and insightful review by Alessandro Porco of David Mcgimpsey's great poetry collection, Sitcom.

From Eyewear:

David McGimpsey’s Sitcom (Coach House, 2007) marks the writer’s much-anticipated return to poetry (it’s been six year since the release of his Hamburger Valley, California [ECW Press, 2001]). As expected, Sitcom is sometimes uproariously funny, always pop-acculturated, and intimidatingly literate. Of course, McGimpsey’s humour has always been thoroughly noted by critics, while the formal, thematic, and philosophic scope of his work (i.e. the more literate elements)— omnipresent in Sitcom— often willfully ignored. Critics will grant that McGimpsey’s humour succeeds; however, that very humour is also used by those same laudatory critics to dismiss McGimpsey’s efforts as trivial or light. An even greater problematic: because McGimpsey has shown repeatedly he possesses a capacity to access and effect a comic mode with ease, it’s wrongly assumed that McGimpsey’s always only working within that mode. Thus, those poems that seemingly challenge such a purview of his work are either misread as exercises in hip postmodern irony or damned to be, in the end, utterly heteroclitic works in his oeuvre.

Read the complete review of Sitcom here.