Early Morning Offerings: A Book of Beatnik Poetry

The purpose of this book is to show the author’s view on how our country’s economic, political, and personal behaviors have affected him and to share his own actions from his life’s experiences. His style of writing is unique as he tries to tell stories without being overly descriptive with lots of jargon about certain events that happened in our country and be held accountable for his own actions as well…

Mark Fargo’s Early Morning Offerings: A Book of Beatnik Poetry is a bitingly personal collection of poems. The book is broken up into eight sections: Cultural Climate, Family, For Maggie, Education, XX and Xy’s, 650 cc: The Other Woman, Dealing with Loss, and Favorite Morning Routines. Within these sections is a total of fifty poems. The poems are written in free form and are technically easy to read, using simple and commonly used vocabulary.

The majority of the first section are observations of American social, cultural, environmental, and political trends. The view is often sorrowful, watching the progress in equality that America has made in recent decades beginning to backslide due to corporate agendas pushing political change. These early poems are timely, even if they were written prior to the last presidential election, due to the increasingly polarizing political views that many people are developing. As such, this first section could potentially drive away some readers from the work entirely. On the other hand, the middle of this section is broken up with a poem on burger porn – commentary on consumerism with some serious humor.

The rest of the book feels more akin to the usual topics found in poetry such as, love, romance, loss, but all of these poems have the feel of being achingly personal. As such, this book makes for a good look at what makes the author tick and the experiences that shaped him, however, some of the poem’s very specific nature makes them a touch difficult to relate to; the journey may still be interesting to follow, but the emotional response is sometimes lacking.

A well organized and interesting read, Early Morning Offerings supplies readers with a diverse collection of topics. Due to the sweepingly large variety of topics, this book is a bit of a mixed bag and so the casual reader is unlikely to really enjoy every poem in the collection. – Portland Book Review