The Operating Theater

Dynatox Ministries

​2016 68 PAGES 

 

As a reader, I read phrases like that and smile but as a writer, when I read phrases like that, I get a little jealous that I didn't come up with it. So simple yet scalpel sharp and threatening.  I knew very little about this book when it was sent other than it was poetry and that the author is a stand up guy with a lot of darkness to channel.  The slim but beautiful book arrived and I read it in a single sitting.  To call this work powerful would be a slight understatement.

Christopher Ropes does not just dig deep. He strips his skin to show you the corded muscle beneath, muscle worm strong from decades of holding back or holding in.  He then flays that muscle to show the vessels that carry his blood, sometimes spill it.  We get to glimpse his bones and his lungs...every part of this man is displayed for you on the page.  There are honest writers and then there is this: a level of brutality and eroticism razor-fighting in an arena for the damned and the dreaming.

These a tableaus, rendered in ash and grue. Drying on hides and silk tapestries, adorning abattoirs and palaces alike.  They are songs for the lost, the dead and the dying. The insane and the sick.  This is honesty in broad fat strokes that wriggle like leeches.   This is a parade of open wound in words.  It is so haunting and so riveting, I read it and immediately went back to page one and read it through a second time.  Poetry is hard to review,  there is no easy way to synopsize the content.  I will say that it is a powerful collection. One that will stain you, probably crimson.

A limited edition The Operating Theater is available from Dynatox Ministries.but is close to sold out. There is a revised edition in the works that should be available soon. 

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