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Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse by Jeff Encke Most Wanted Website Purchase this book/deck of cards from Amazon.com A casino quality deck of cards and a book of poems. A Last Tangos Edition.

As an editor of an online journal and a working poet I am obsessed with forms. Jeff Encke has created a book of poems with one of the most original formal constructions I have encountered: a deck of casino quality playing cards. This collection of poems works as hard-copy hypertext, visual art, Blake like mini-boadsides, or good company when playing solitaire. The Joker card turned copyright page says "the verse excerpts quoted in this deck derive from an unpublished manuscript of poems by the author" and that is exactly what is provided. Each card contains around four lines of verse combined with visual images ranging from beautiful silhouettes of tulips to disturbing (all to familiar) images of torture. The concept of the book is a riff on the political index cards created to aid troops prior to invading Iraq in identifying members of Sadame Hussain's regime and the subsequent popular parodies which followed. But this collection is no parody, no quick or shallow joke. These are carefully crafted poems both beautiful and disturbing which are politically oriented in the sense that if one is attentive to human concerns one is politically oriented. These poems fluctuate between looking inward as well as out at the world at large. The 10 of diamonds has a sienna photograph of what looks to me like a Northwest beach seeming to fade into the atmosphere and reads: "I hoped to unlock / the answers, / to sweep the barrel / of the skull" and the deck continues along this tenor or hoping to unlock answers. But of course answers are never simple and such searching perhaps leads only to more questions or individual frustration as the 3 of clubs expresses: "look at what I have done, / this shameful thing, / saying to much / of nothing" and "as though cruelty / were itself / an object of love" these poems pursue the major objectives of art through irony, beauty (visual and written), and dark humor. I highly recommend this unique collection for playing (I can't think of a better deck to play 52 card pick up with ...fragments of poetry everywhere!) and especially for reading. — Jeremy Voigt   Note: Read and see a sampling of cards on the Most Wanted website

Jeff Encke was born in Pittsburgh in 1971 and raised in Seattle with his three younger brothers and sister, never more than a stone’s throw from the Puget Sound. He began college with plans to become a mathematician and film-maker, but left a fledgling poet, graduating from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) in 1993. Faced with the options of pursuing an MFA in poetry or PhD in English, he chose the latter, moving to New York and eventually completing his doctorate at Columbia University, where he served as writer-in-residence in the Program in Narrative Medicine in 2002.