Lisa de Nikolits reviews MLA Chernoff's ESTRO FLUNKY: FIELD NOTES (2023) at the Wolsak and Wynn blog,

Lisa de Nikolits was good enough to provide a first review of MLA Chernoff's ESTRO FLUNKY: FIELD NOTES (2023), as part of a listing of "great summer reads," over at the Wolsak and Wynn blog. Thanks so much! You can read her original post here. As she writes:

In case you’re new to MLA Chernoff, they’re a Toronto-based poet, performance artist, meme enthusiast and recovering academic. Their debut full-length poetry collection, [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2021. MLA is also the author of several chapbooks, including delet this (Bad Books, 2018), TERSE THIRSTY (Gap Riot Press, 2019), I'M LIKE THE GREAT GRANDCHILD OF MARX & COCA-COLA (BUT NON-BINEY) (845 Press, 2022) and ESTRO FLUNKY (above/ground press, 2023).

I completely loved [SQUELCH PROCEDURES] and was delighted to read ESTRO FLUNKY. 

I delight in the workings of MLA Chernoff’s wondrous mind as they deftly juggle words, images, emotions, sights and sounds. 

Sharply insightful, citrus and crackling, ESTRO FLUNKY is a reader’s delight. Political, sexual, life-affirming, life-analyzing, brilliantly insightful and incredibly, unfathomably clever, ESTRO FLUNKY’s “pomes” are woven with the minutiae of life’s tragedies and the overwhelming challenges of life: 

“Seasonal Repressive”

    Because feelings are
    H=A=R=D
    and all games
    inevitably 
    stop
    short.

Or from “Soyjacking”

    Lusting prosaic, 
    actually: if anything. 
    If things must be hushed 
    to the extreme, this is a tomato timer, 
    a political fiction, a fear of the self, 
    keying futurity, slashing its tires.

A collection I will repeatedly return to, to plumb the depths of MLA Chernoff’s most wondrous mind.