Jack Skelley’s Interstellar Theme Park Reviewed Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Shannon Vare Christine

Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing
by Jack Skelley
BlazeVOX
June 2022, Paperback, 204 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1609644116

The titular opening poem in Jack Skelley’s Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing, invites the reader to an avant-garde setting where the speaker proclaims prayer-like a listing of “I want” items to consider. This is a place where “Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd” could “levitate the Tomorrowland Terrace” or where “Fruity Pebbles vaccination bars, with stalactites nippling jelly babies” can both simultaneously coexist, alongside other punk aesthetic and pop culture artifacts. Skelley creates worlds in his poems that are immediately recognizable, while also somehow suspended in nostalgically futuristic places. Whether a poem is set in Disneyland, a cemetery, or a “Demon-Sized Planet,” the natural or reimagined vision of each setting looms large “colored bubbles making worlds multiply.”

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