LA PENDAISON
(The Hangman’s Tree)

There is a Japanese proverb that
says any person who can fold
1000 cranes is granted one wish.
This is the part where a crane
folds 1000 people. This is the
part where the swallow slays the
dragon. This is the night. This is
the night. 1000 people hang
from one tree. There is this part
I never told you. Half of those
people used to be my neighbors.
The other half were my friends.

Click here to buy on Amazon Kindle.

Poetry/Art | $18.00 paperback, $5.99 Kindle version, 116 pages, published by Birds, LLC, 2011. ISBN: 9780982617748

ABOUT KINGS OF THE F**KING SEA

More a play or unfilmable film than a book of poems, more a wish than a journey, Kings of the F**king Sea is based on the Odyssey, the writings of Joseph Campbell, art historical texts and museum exhibitions. Kings of the F**king Sea unfolds more like a play than a book of poems, is more an archive than an art book.

Kings of the F**king Sea reveals a world that exists on the edge of society but is subservient to it, a world of artists, poets, merchants, sailors, and soldiers who break themselves against the sea and the vast unknowable opportunity it represents. As one poem goes, “The world invents, the sea discloses, and irony isn’t a necessary tool for successful men.” On the sea, as in art, some make it and others die nameless, destitute of love, forgotten.

Conceived by poet Dan Boehl and artist Jonathan Marshall, Kings of the F**king Sea is the culmination of their four-year friendship and collaboration. The book features full-color images of Marshall’s drawings, paintings, collages, and sculptures, working in tandem with the poems to flesh out a beautiful, broken, psychedelic, and necessary tale of artist expression and its failure.

I often have a difficult time distinguishing between the memories of my childhood nightmares, the movie Time Bandits, and now Kings of the F**king Sea. At the heart of each is an unrecoverable distance from home. In Dan Boehl’s poems, the sea is not home. If we stay on it, we will eventually drown in it, but there is nothing we can do. His poems are unforgivably wise. Like the sea, they are an unafraid mirror. And though they remind us it’s always too late–that our adventure is a constant failure–their beauty keeps us afloat for just long enough.
—Zachary Schomburg

“There is no level / in my mind, in other words / the world.” Are you about to read this book? I think you must be ready. Dan Boehl’s poems are a talisman, a supernatural scaffold over our neglected conscience. Everything happens, and it stings, and is beautiful when it’s not awful.
—CAConrad

LA ROUE (The Helm)

But behind the rich, almost cinematic
certainties that history has given us
about the war, concerning the people,
the relationships, the materials, the
time frame, the technology, lies an
impenetrable area of shadow. No one
has ever explained how a con-
scientious public allowed this to happen,
or why.

5.5″ x 8.5″ Chapbook. Printed text and hand-stamped images,gray covers with black ink. Printed on high quality linen paper. Night blue end paper. Printed in an edition of 100.

$4.50 free shipping in USA/Canada. Available from Greying Ghost.

Read the full  8 star Cold Front review here:

“This is not easy stuff to take on, and many of us don’t. (Though they exist, there are few collections coming out from the university presses, or even through SPD, that deal with this kind of thing.) It is probably the fear of writing a sappy, uninformed and altogether shitty war poem that holds many of us back from attempting them, not so much an ignorance or apathy.  It’s the fear of getting it wrong, and getting called out for it. It’s the fear of not doing it justice when every artistic medium, even poetry, has a difficult time doing war justice. But Boehl goes for it, and even over seventeen short poems, he gets it right. So I suppose one answer is to take it piece by piece, moment by moment, and focus on what we can. Boehl is here taking it on, zooming in on a reference point in history and adding a modern humanity that can easily be lost during commercial breaks in the evening news, or by a simple skimming of the online article. Whether you agree with me or not about the state of modern war poetry, or care enough to check out Jacques Callot’s original etchings for the accompaniment, we need this small collection on our coffee tables and in our collections as an appendix to our often abbreviated and streamlined realities.” — DJ Dolack

Cube, or
7 Complete Strangers of Widely Varying Personality Characteristics are Involuntarily Placed in an Endless Kafkaesque Maze Containing Deadly Traps

Able to take only so much hip-hop and databases,
I get some coffee and shoot-the-shit
with the co-workers there. Times like this
I think about that movie Cube.
The best-worst movie I have ever seen,
it’s about these people who wake up in a giant cube.
Frantically they run around the cube’s identical rooms
discovering each other
and getting bloodbathed by unforeseen traps
set by an unseen boss. It’s a test. If they work together
they live. They fall into the regular
character types: the soldier, the clown, the babe.
Only the autistic guy lives.
He actually likes the work of not getting
bloodbathed. Tomorrow, I’ll be
somebody’s boss. But today
I can confidently count on myself
as someone I would like.

Available from Pavement Saw Press.
Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Series
Winner of the 2006-07 Chapbook Award
ISBN 978-1-886350-69-4
28 pages, saddle stapled
$6.00