PRAISE FOR THE IMPROPER USE OF PLATES

Liquescent and discoverable as a jawbreaker floating in space, The Improper Use of Plates is a scope so vast yet so confined, full of sirens and suction cups and dentists and skeletons and Christmas trees all marching to the tune of a search for familial glue. Angelo Maneage’s debut chapbook makes a smoothie of curiosity and hope and tricks us into becoming the blade. I keep coming back to this collection for the breakage and subsequent miracle of repair. For the ways I can wrap my own endless wandering around the absurdity of Maneage’s. He teaches us how to find humility in our griefs. I am thankful for the new ways in which the text helps me sing. I know that this book, too, will give you wings and make you float.

— Matt Mitchell, author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy

Through intense acts of witnessing the disparity between body and mind, in The Improper Use of Plates, Angelo Maneage uncovers how our most intimate moments can become personal apocalypse: “I think the end of the world is happening for me.” While he writes of a world gone tilted, Maneage grounds us through uncanny imagery and a voice that refuses to go quiet. We see the speaker’s pain as a visceral uncovering: “I started to lift my skin up only like a magician with hooks.” We understand aftermath as domestic shambles, with the speaker’s announcement that “we are going to have to vacuum up / // my brain.” The Improper Use of Plates gestures towards a collaged world, one that blurs the borders of imagination and reality to pierce the core of true feeling. Maneage’s collection is a supercut both of what awes and what haunts us.

— Samantha Fain, author of Coughing Up Planets and sad horse music

“It felt right to be coughing on the ground,” Angelo Maneage tells us in The Improper Use of Plates. These poems move as they must: they slide on their stomachs, crawl around, get “horny in a different way,” and cough up remarkable, moving insights into family, health, survival, and the affections that sustain us. “Beep beep beep boop,” goes the transmission; Maneage listens with urgency, with patience, with a mind like a “blue bubble geyser.” Or is it an “upside-down Christmas tree?” A glowing box of cupcakes? With quicksilver wit and perceptive astonishment, The Improper Use of Plates finds its way into “the middle of a miracle” and invites us to join.

— Zach Savich, author of Daybed

Because he has great gifts—in particular, a strong narrative imagination—Angelo Maneage’s poems are both surprising and reassuring. They are surprising insofar as they do not progress in ways one might expect them to progress, nor even in ways one might expect ‘surprising poems’ to progress—they remain ahead of one even when one thinks one knows how they will remain ahead of one. And they are reassuring because one can sense Maneage’s skill in creating and utilizing the possibility for surprise via narrative. In other words, they satisfy you with what you didn’t know you needed.

— Shane McCrae, author of Sometimes I Never Suffered

Angelo Maneage’s The Improper Use of Plates is a rambunctious, terrifying narrative of illness and coping, familial love, and the manic state of waiting for health-related changes. “I was crawling around I guess I was // all over the place” says the narrator, bereft, from a hospital floor, as prelude to operatic bargaining with the Devil/God for their mother’s life. This collection is delightfully paranoid and explosive, Maneage’s absurd and tender syntax reminiscent of Daniel Borzutzky or Sabrina Orah Mark, operating in the space between fable and nightmare. These are bleakly hilarious poems and Maneage is a master at capturing the awkward slapstick of a skirmish with death.

— Caryl Pagel, author of Out Of Nowhere Into Nothing and Twice Told

Microscopic moments string together as a means of grappling with the biological purgatory between having been better and getting worse. Words disintegrate to noisy parts between silences, punctuated by beeps and buzzing, materializing back into something sharp enough to stitch shut the incision cut in a futile effort to stave off the entropy of being a body. Maneage’s bedside manner is a trip; you can tell how much he cares by how profusely his sweat deluges over you. The Improper Use of Plates left me feeling consoled about my ultimate inability to help myself or anybody else to whom I feel a duty. Give in.

— Crow Jonah Norlander, Managing Editor at X-R-A-Y

Angelo Maneage’s The Improper Use of Plates is an unsettling and brief collection of lyrics that emerge, alien, as if from a fluorescent waiting room at the end of the world. There, sick mothers are strapped to the tops of cars “per [the] doctor’s advice,” grandmothers measuredly gather pieces of gushing brain to keep them from spoiling, and dogs let themselves in and out of the house at leisure. Maneage’s speaker is “horny in a different way,” as he regards the strangenesses of his landscape with the unshakeable good humor and funnily even-keeled bewilderment of a Twin Peaks special guest star. The Improper Use of Plates unravels its own irruptions of language, devolving frequently into estranging and digitized ghostly voices, sirens, and sudden sequences of beeps and boops, slyly suggesting there is a thrilling and desperate absurdity to our continuing reliance on narrative in the chaos of our crumbling contemporary.

— Jamie Hood, Author of how to be a good girl