Micro Review of American Busboy, by Matthew Guenette

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American Busboy

Micro Review of American Busboy, by Matthew Guenette

 

University of Akron Press, 2011: $14.95 paperback

 

 
I’ve been meaning to write about this book since I read it, and reread it, and read it again just to make sure. Two other reviews I’ve read mention the word “class” a grand total of once, which tells me those reviewers may have under addressed the key component of Guenette’s fixations in American Busboy. I don’t know how this book could possibly be read as anything else—even though it’s formally adventurous and luxuriously absurd in its moves. Here’s the deal, if you’ve thrown cornstarch in your polyester pants just to make it through a shift without waddling through the restaurant like a penguin, you know what it means to be a busboy—and Guenette throws the cornstarch right there: “so your ass won’t rash.”
 
 
 
 
This book is mock class warfare between busboys, cooks, hostesses, tourists, waitress and managers, and that conflict is what gives it 77 pages of endurance. Granted, this busboy isn’t a busboy working at some greased up, short-order joint in Gary, Indiana, and this adds a layer of humor to the problematic. This is an East Coast tourist trap. This is THE CLAM SHACK! This is the place where, as the speaker says in “National Flag Week,” the “new rich estates// along the shore/ looked like cheap estates/ trying to look// like rich old estates.” Nobody, not even the hostess, is exempt from the critical eye, and by virtue the book is inclusive with its indictments. As the speaker admits in “National Hot Dog Month”: “Inevitably a busboy/ gets tartar sauce on his face.” I don’t know if Guenette ever worked as a busboy, but I’d be shocked if he hadn’t. Guenettes poems are immersed in the restaurant world that buzzes around us as our fingers slide down the face of the menu—a world that has never been given a stage this lavish before, complete with lobster bib and tartar sauce. 
 
 
 
—by Travis Mossotti