"Jeffrey Encke's deck of poem cards, what a fine idea. Each time
you read them, new poem-combinations emerge, and the poems gradually
come closer into view. This is a pleasurable accretion. Just now reading
them, with Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne on the tv in the background,
familiar blues, new poems, very fine indeed."
"To begin my reviews here I juxtapose the online portion of the
reviews with the tactility of a lovely set of playing cards I have just
obtained. On the back of each card is a hand, surrounded by khaki background
and imprinted with Arabic script. Each hand has the same script. I do
not know what it says. I've tried to keep my cards in order (no pun
intended), and the epigraph, the Joker, reads: 'The pressing social
reality in which we all find ourselves touches on the card game but
goes no further; the bounds of its table is another country' (Borges).
The cards are amazing. Each contains lines of poetry by Encke, along
with provocative photos and drawings. On a seven of diamonds, a hooded
figure brings back horrific memories of Abu Ghraib, along with these
lines by Encke: 'as I sat / between floors // wielding a koan / of amino
acids // dissecting our grip / of intermingled fingers.' On the ace
of diamonds, against a grey background: 'as though cruelty / were itself
// an object of love.' Ten of hearts, the better symbol, a beautiful
and haunting 'shot' of a black-robed figure against a background of
red: 'we speak openly / of taboos, // keeping the heads / of our enemies
/ closest, // and fresh.' Seven of spades: the silhouette of another
Iraqi prisoner, the one we all know: 'the stench of supper / ripples
my lips.' These cards are beautiful and evoke a lover's response to
a cruel and vicious chain of events."
"An unexpectedly effective and poignant set of poems that is more
than a parody of Department of Defense's 'Deck of Doom' playing cards
used to help round up important figures in Saddam Hussein's regime in
Iraq. Encke has collaborated with Vivek Chadaga, a Boston-based writer
and graphic designer, to create haunting lyrical fragments superimposed
over poignant images."
"Last week, at Aaron McCollough's and Jeff Encke's reading, I
bought a copy of Encke's Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse, which
is a deck of cards. I urge you to look at the site, & even get a
deck for yourself ... I talked a bit to Encke after the reading about
the difficulty of physically producing such a project (an effort to
print the cards in China apparently fell because of censorship, but
a printer in India was found); later, when I read on the site about
his choice to excerpt from his poems so as to fit the text on a 2-1/2
by 3-1/2 card, I felt a sense of kinship. That's how I began composing
f2f, on index cards, because I intended to program them as hypertexts
in small lexia ... I love the versatility of how the poems can be read,
in millions of possible orders, in conjunction with the Personality
Identification Playing Cards or apart from them. Vivek Chadaga and Encke
share credit for the design, which is beautiful, and the fragments of
Encke's poems are as haunting as the fragments of knowledge we have
of our own country's involvement in the horrors of this war."
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