Another thing: dude is funny. And not in the way books try to be funny and aren’t funny really for what they are but because you know it is supposed to be—like here’s my funny scene involving shaving cream and tits. Instead, Partyknife is funny logically, in how it organizes its thoughts, surprising the first time and then impressive in a different way the second time. For all the wild shit crammed in here, all the beer and stoner metal and Lacan and art bros and quiet panic attacks, it gels and works machine-style. It makes me want to stare at shit with a blown-out smile on my face, which is good because that keeps happening when I read it.

With its sweaty-palmed longing and headbanging self-destruction, Magers’s debut is like a Fast Times at Ridgemont High of poetry, only faster.

Partyknife fashions itself as a mix tape—by definition disjunctive, a patchwork that requires a specific lens—about Pratt parties, drinking games, grudge fucking and oblivion. Whoever is holding the partyknife (all poems composed by D. Magers) is steeped in the sort of decadence and condescension associated with young, urban creative types, the usual hipster schlep, all the while stumbling onto abrupt and often absurd realizations: “The punk kid in the punk house laughs at the paint he wipes on my new shirt,/but I am an insane god.” But beneath his brash announcements (“I’m the Jesus of making out with girls drunk”) and shoulder-shrug fatalism (“And when I die, I’ll just be dead”) there is an uneasy relationship between these poems and the world they inhabit, one overburdened by self-importance and skepticism.

I tried to sneak PARTYKNIFE into a movie I had it in my bag but it was too loud, they made me leave. I threw it down on the ground and yelled DOMINO MOTHERFUCKER and every kid there handed over their money, they were pissed. I stood outside your window holding up PARTYKNIFE like a boombox. I carved John Cusak out of soap; PARTYKNIFING the flakes into the bin. Before PARTYKNIFE velvet was just velvet, now it’s fucking CRUSHED. Some guy was looking at me outside the Porn Emporium so I PARTYKNIFED him right in the fucking eye. He took hours to die.

There is an air to Dan Magers’s first collection that many will relate to but few will have experienced. The subject matter shouldn’t be read superficially, which would exclude the deep intelligence throughout the lyrics. New apogees of anxiety, excess, loss, and nihilism are pursued in Partyknife, conveyed artfully by the author for the sake of Art’s—and by proxy, society’s—vitality.

Last night I dreamt about a poem called “Indie Message Board” by Dan Magers. Dan Magers isn’t like any poet you know. His aesthetic is young–in the sense that he knows more about the real world than the real world–and simultaneously aged–everything one needs to know about changes so awfully fast. His range of existential hopelessness and sexual promiscuousness/artful deviance conjoins pop culture and hipsterdom in a space of poetry that reassures you that you no longer have to feel guilty about all those weird Youtube videos you watched, that guy’s dick you saw hanging out of his dress, or when you touched that sleeping girl’s arm in the New Museum. Poetry as Antonioni (the old man said that). Poetry Foucault. Poetry as a long party. Poetry as Ecstasy, post-Ecstasy, with a hint of Denis Johnson.