Review of "Girl-Watching," "Judo," "Why I Never Applied Myself to Pool," and "Nose Job" by Dan Brown

Girl-Watching, Judo, Why I Never Applied Myself to Pool, and Nose Job by Dan Brown appeared in the March 2013 issue of Poetry Magazine.

In Girl-Watching, the poet observes in pleasant rhyme that the girls these days are pretty much clones of one another.  I noticed this phenomenon too at my daughter's volleyball game this past weekend--I had difficulty telling one team member from the other.

Judo is a 6-liner that promises not to "force people to their knees."  Most people are doing that without any assistance, the poet observes.

In Why I Never Applied Myself to Pool, the poet laments that he would require not just better eye-hand coordination but "a whole other orb altogether" in order to be any good at pool.

In a clever, insightful rhyme about human nature, the poet observes in Nose Job that having a physical defect corrected does not often lead to empathy for those with the same uncorrected defect.  In fact, pity and scorn for one's until recently fellow defectives is often greater in the corrected than "in someone to his beauty born."  This one reminded me of the Family Guy episode (pictured) when Peter Griffin has plastic surgery, transforming him from a fat schlub into a chiseled Adonis.  Peter joins a "beautiful persons" club and begins referring to all other people contemptuously as "normies."