John Sweet knows a brutal end is coming, or at least, he identifies those who sing the bullshit dogma and try to escape through the palace window. “The Fact that God is neither a question nor an answer,” a line from “Running Dry”—a poem from his new collection And All of Us Drinking the Blood of Our Enemies continues his quest for that brutal truth, finality is coming, it is not going to be pleasant, and our walks through our own version of hell will lead our condemnation to that dark place we rarely want to talk about.
Personally, I have never met John Sweet, but I have been an admirer of his work for years. We both came up in that late 80s-90s mimeograph era, when magazines like Zen Baby edited by Christopher Robin and Instant Pussy by Misti Rainwater-Lites would show up monthly in our mailboxes with words of love, hatred and just the right amount of sex to keep us somewhat satisfied. I know there were many more zines that gave us an opportunity to show our stuff, but age has left me forgetting the heart and guts of these little mags.
John Sweet’s words, however, always stuck with me. His writing reached into the souls of the damned without pretense or remorse. It was as if he was giving a moral choice to those who were on the edge of leaving. “The simple act of turning each of my half-remembered summer afternoons into something more profound than religion”—from the poem, “Slow Burn”.
He never overstates but leaves the reader in a dark glow—always laying out the sad, angry reality of a population who turned distant. A breakdown of the family nucleus. The blind state while standing at the cliffs. John’s new collection continues to isolate that spear in the gut where deadly emotions dare to run with the chance of living…
The last chance of living.
Always one option in the poems of John Sweet.
AND ALL OF US DRINKING THE BLOOD OF OUR ENEMIES is now available for pre-order at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/blood/198
A former collegiate offensive lineman and football coach for 26 years, Dan Provost’s poetry has been published both online and in print since 1993. He is the author of 14 books/chapbooks. His latest, Foundations of Cheap Penance, was released by DeadMansPressInk in November 2021. He has been twice nominated for The Best of the Web and has read his poetry throughout the United States. He lives in Berlin, New Hampshire with his wife Laura, and dog Bella.
