67 Mixed Messages

Ed Allen

Reviews of the book

“The least politically correct but also funniest book under review here is Ed Allen’s 67 Mixed Messages, a sonnet sequence that is technically proficient, thoughtful, surprisingly ambivalent, and very inappropriate. These qualities are all advantages. . . . Clearly, an obsession is at work, but fortunately, the poet retains his self-awareness, a crucial source of the book’s strength: whether Suzi actually exists or is only an invention, Allen subverts our expectations for poems of unrequited lust. . . . [Suzi] emerges as more distinctly individual than the majority of her sonnet-courted kin: ‘she smokes, she’s friends with homophobic men,’ spells overalls as ‘overhauls,’ lives off her student loan check in a trailer with ‘leaky sink,’ fibs when she wants to avoid the speaker, and may well be promiscuous . . . . While 67 Mixed Messages probably won’t earn kudos from an academy where unsmiling grimness cancels human feeling, Ed Allen’s hilarious poetic account of loneliness and love—of forbidden feeling, fantasy, and lust's inevitable fading—shows that contemporary experience and centuries-old tradition continue to combine in striking ways.” —from the review in Pleiades by Ned Balbo.

“With 67 Mixed Messages, Ed Allen gives a technically breathtaking tour-de-force of the sonnet form. . . . I read this book straight through in one sitting. The relentless meter is hypnotic, and builds a momentum that makes it almost impossible to stop turning the pages. The reader becomes as obsessed as the narrator, counting iambs and matching rhymed words, reading ‘I LOVE SUZI GRACE’ with increasing awe each time it shows up, and anticipating each ‘I love you, Suzi’ as if he/she is complicit in this affair, saying I love you too. . . . The tension between high and low diction—between this traditional form and the modern setting—is the sort of tension that a sonnet needs to be truly compelling.” —from the review in Cranky by Amy Schrader.

“For his first book of poetry, novelist and Flannery O’Connor Award-winning writer Ed Allen (Straight Through the Night, Mustang Sally, and Ate it Anyway) has set himself a formidable task. Each of the 67 poems that comprise 67 Mixed Messages is not only a Shakespearean sonnet, but also an acrostic, and all of those acrostics bear the exact same message: ‘I LOVE SUZI GRACE.’ The first four words of the second stanza in each poem are also the same: ‘I love you, Suzi.’ The result is oddly compelling, intellectually satisfying, occasionally disturbing, and loaded with equal amounts of pathos and humor. . . . What is most pleasing about these poems is how Allen maintains the traditional form of the sonnet while addressing his humble subject matter, acknowledging that ‘Eros lives among the lawn-parked cars.’” —from the review in Whistling Shade by Dallas Crow