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Porco does not fail to astonish by performing a tense merger between items of high scholarly reference and pop culture.
In his Confessions, VIII.vii, Augustine proclaims, "da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo" ("grant me chastity and continence, but not yet"). Much prior to his becoming an influential neoplatonic bishop and Church Father, it would be an understatement to characterize his life as being immodest. Under the auspices of studying rhetoric in Carthage, Augustine gave full range to his appetite for hedonism and debauchery, taking on a concubine and living what passed for a seedy existence in the 4th century.
Porco's svelte offering is a bawdy, modern-day raconteur of such excesses, feting sex, jazz, ontology, and drugs with poetry that actively courts prose. With a delectable and saucy style, Porco does not fail to astonish by performing a tense merger between items of high scholarly reference and pop culture. Latin phrases and invocations of Kant, Gogol, Pasolini, Eliot, et al are tastefully appended as they shoulder for dominance among an Arcanum of ribald subjects such as whores, dildos and pole dancers. What makes this collection of poems wonderfully vertiginous reading is the obvious breadth of the poet's knowledge and deftness in crafting these to suit contemporary subjects of delightfully dubious moral standing. Porco takes us on a dark journey into strip clubs, across the fields of dirty limericks, and all the while acting as a harlequin Virgil. To gain a fair appreciation of Porco's style, one would have to picture a frenzied hybrid of Burroughs and Bukowski as filtered through Umberto Eco. With the sharp wit of Voltaire and the echoes of Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, Porco's work is highly deserving of all the acclaim it receives.
