Earnest themes delivered with jazzy wit in a new poetry chapbook by Mike Schneider The title poem of this new chapbook from Mike Schneider situates us inside "an expanding gas / bubble from some kind of cosmic / burp" in which "We exist, hieroglyphic bird / tracks, a parade of scratch marks / on sheets of pulped cellulose / & rag, that signify what?" His "scratch marks" here signify quite a lot, in fact, embracing an entire mad world that he circumnavigates at a breathless pace, with Elvis and Dali and Hoagie Carmichael and Tom Mix and a host of others along for the ride, companions and guides and saviors. Schneider's language crackles with jazzy improvisation, but his wit is in the service of serious themes, nowhere more so than in his tribute to his Vietnam vet brother, "fucked / by history or whatever you want to call / this shit-hole business, that not only happens / it happened to my brother." So, it's personal, this brief, intense survey of the state of the world, but also universal. And at the close of the final poem, when he puts his cap back on his pen and "It makes a small click," that click reverberates long after reading. Poetry.