Davis, Peter. Hitler's Mustache. Seattle: Barnwood Press, 2006. 80 pp. Paperback. $16.95. ISBN 9780935306514.

Filled with mustaches as well as just about every literary form imaginable, Peter Davis’s book is an imaginative exploration of the genres, ideologies, and tropes that literally dictate writing and other types of creative expression.  Portraying Hitler’s mustache from every possible angle, from the list to the mission statement and even the menu, this book proves consistently smart and impressive in its stylistic range.  The poems of Hitler’s mustache entertain and amuse with incongruities created by a formal maneuvering of absurd images that are evoked in the poems (e.g. Hitler’s mustache on a dinner date and Hitler’s mustache the fan of arena rock band Journey).

In Davis’s book, the lyric, the ode, the short story, and even the novel become lenses. Through them, the reader views this same black square mustache, which changes to fit and satirize the form whereby it is being written. An astute commentary on the ways form shapes content, one example of this technique is visible in the poem “Hitler’s Mustache: The Novel," which includes the first and last paragraph of this conjectural novel.  Mimicking the syntax, tone, and diction of traditional literary fiction, this poem parodies the genre by inserting truly bizarre and surreal images into a form that authors normally take a realist approach to. Davis writes:  “It was the winter of frown.  It was the mustache winter.  The winter that Aunt Cape’s house was robbed and her father’s silver watch was stolen […] After they took her to St. Mary’s of the Virgin Suicide, in February, she was mumbling through her fur-filled mouth, ‘When baby Adolf comes, he comes with a new pig — that fur oink on his lip will squeal” (47).  Juxtaposing more mundane details, such as the silver watch, with more oddities, such as the aunt’s fur-lined mouth and the pig on the baby’s upper lip, the paragraph imitates a stereotypical novel in its somber tone. But it becomes slyly satirical in its use of nonsensical phrases presented in a dramatic, serious way.

Initiating an interesting dialogue between past literary forms and new subject matter, Davis’s presentation of literary figures like Frank O’Hara, Russell Edson, and Robert Bly satirizes while appropriating stylistic devices, replacing their more grave subject matter with the illogical and humorous.  Parodying Russell Edson’s prose poems, for example, which make strange, dark logical leaps and, through their use of the ellipsis, push for extension, Davis adopts Edson's style yet abandons his subject matter (often preoccupied with the dysfunctionality of the nuclear family).  As Davis says in “Hitler’s Mustache: Russell 'Mustache' Edson": “The consolidated facial hairs yell, ‘We aren’t consolidated at all!  We are individuals all joined together in the common cause of being unconsolidated’” (55). Inserting Hitler’s mustache into this contemporary form, the poem questions the distinction between the comical and the serious by way of similar stylistic techniques in a very different context.

Entertaining and surprising while commenting on well-known authors, Davis’s book is a gravely hilarious, highly literate read for anyone who enjoys modernist, post-modernist, or wonderfully bizarre poetry.

— Kristina Marie Darling