JOKER
by Arlo Haskell
2009
Joker presents an imagined world comfortably isolated from the sensibilities of American life. Set in Key West, Haskell’s poems address end-of-the-road promise and frustration marked by dazzling sea and sky, pervasive alcoholism, and an uneasy social hierarchy of tourists, real-estate speculators, and service-industry workers. By turns candid and deceitful, maudlin and maddeningly reticent, Haskell’s masked narratives are full of wry insight into the technological and political upheavals of “this lucky accidental country.”

Arlo Haskell is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Sand Paper Press. He is the author of the poetry collection Joker (2009); and creator of online content for the Key West Literary Seminar (where he has been media director since 2008), including interviews, brief essays, and an annotated collection of literary audio recordings. He was an adviser on the 2010 public television documentary, Key West: Bohemia in the Tropics, and is completing an edition of Charles Olson’s previously-unpublished Key West Notebooks.

“Arlo Haskell's quietly gripping poems conjure an ambience as temperate and welcoming as ocean air.”
—John Ashbery