Paul Allen

For this assignment I picked poems by Paul Allen. He put together a book of poems and called it American Crawl. It’s around 73 pages so not to long of a read. That was what I was going for. I find it hard sometimes to really get into something if it’s real long. But Paul’s book was quite short, so I feel most people looking for a short interesting read, this book would not be to bad of a start. First off the cover page for this book I thought was really cool. There is a picture of two humans and an alligator. The alligator being on the bottom is crawling along, just like the title. So are both the humans, they are on their stomachs to what looks to be crawling. His book is full of imagery and sound, which I didn’t expect to come from this book, but honestly I had no idea what to expect. He tells a story about a man through the life of a man. Each poem correlates to the next one, which creates his story. Which I thought was pretty cool, something I would not even begin to think about creating. The book was published in 1997 so it’s a relatively new book. It is written in modern language compared to something like Shakespeare it sounds like it’s a brand new book. The book starts out by a man telling you the story of one of his friends killing himself. Then it goes to the speaker and the reader reads about everything the main character is thinking in his head. It is very interesting and I found it to keep my attention long enough so that I could finish the book in one sitting. I found that Paul used a lot of punctuation. It made it flow much easier I thought and made me stop and pause more than I would have if there were no punctuation, so I enjoyed that. Some of the different poems are also laid out differently, for instance one poem is set up more like a regular book, where another is set up like a traditional poem. I thought that was pretty cool, both having the same effect on my interpretation of the different poems. They were able to flow together very nicely creating a very interesting end result. For those of you wanting an interesting poetic read I would recommend Paul’s book to you.