'Dearest Saddam: New Playing Cards Address 'Iraqs Most Wanted as Lovers

How do we love the unlovable? Seattle-based poet Jeffrey Encke offers a new, controversial installment in the year-old genre of Iraqs Most Wanted" playing card satires, excerpting poems that address Saddam Hussein and his supporting cast as though they were his lovers.

Seattle, WA (PRWEB) September 7, 2004 -- The words with which we conceptualize objects of love and hatred bear a striking resemblance," says Jeffrey Encke, author of Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse (Last Tangos, 2004), the latest installment in the year-old genre of Iraqs Most Wanted" playing card satires. The psychological processes of idealization that inhabit the two emotions are analogous, almost interchangeable."

Encke, a widely published poet and literary scholar, decided last summer, in the wake of the hotly-contested decision to invade Iraq, to write a series of poems to the most wanted" figures featured in the Department of Defenses Deck of Doom," published April 2003. I originally conceived of the book as a collection of love poems ironically addressed to war criminals," he says, an approach at once satirical and appropriate to my objective of exploring the way human subjectivity dissolves in language imbued with fierce emotion."

By the time Encke finished the manuscript in March 2004, he found that, instead of love poems, he had rendered a collection of metaphysical lyrics rooted in a private language of anguish and despair." With the help of Boston-based writer and graphic designer Vivek Chadaga, he proceeded to develop his own deck of playing cards, excerpting lines from the poems for each. By presenting the verse on cards, I hoped to emphasize the irony of identifying ethical judgment with gambling."

The face of each card in the casino-quality, poker-sized deck features a unique design, blending such imagery as DNA autoradiographs, phrenological diagrams, satellite photographs, x-rays, fossils, flora, and hooded figures (including a modified Abu Ghraib abuse photo). The back of each card depicts a reproduction of the authors hand with the word matlub," a rough transliteration of most wanted," inscribed in Arabic on his palm.

Most Wanted differs from other species of Iraqs Most Wanted satires in that it does not take an explicitly partisan view of the Iraq conflict. Instead, alluding to the double meaning of the expression most wanted," Encke sets out to explore how objects of love and hatred, whether American, Iraqi, Israeli, or Palestinian, are both in some sense products of human desire.

The US Militarys publication of the officially-designated Personality Identification Playing Cards has given rise to dozens of parodies, most of them targeted at the George W. Bush Administration, among them Bush Cards, the GOP Most Wanted, the Deck of Republican Chickenhawks, and the Bush Regime Card Deck. Such parodies have been particularly popular abroad in France, Russia, and the UK.

Released August 15, 2004, Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse (ISBN 0-9758578-0-0) is available for purchase from the authors Website (www.matlub.net), as well as in select bookstores. Retail price: $10.

To request a review copy, or to arrange an interview, please contact Jeffrey Encke at his Website or by phone at 206-550-0582.

About the Author

Jff Encke was born in Pittsburgh in 1971 and raised in Seattle with his three younger brothers and sister. In 2003, he completed his PhD in English at Columbia University, where he had served as writer-in-residence in the Program in Narrative Medicine in 2002. His poetry has appeared in various journals, including American Writing, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Octopus, Salt Hill, 3rd Bed, and Quarterly West. Encke has taught creative writing and criticism at both Columbia and Richard Hugo House in Seattle, where he currently resides, and will be delivering a paper on the rhetoric of gambling and war criminality at the University of Western Ontario in October.

Advance Praise
Encke takes as his titles the Iraqi names on the U.S. Military deck of 'most wanted cards and sets them against lyrics of longing and despair. The result is a willed confusion and questioning in which the elements of the two landscapes, rendered in precise detail ('black salt, 'oranges exchanged between tongues, 'collars of stone), overlap and are conjoined. These are fine, visceral, tender, bitter, and truthful poems."

-- Hermine Meinhard, poetry editor of 3rd Bed and author of Bright Turquoise Umbrella (Tupelo Press, 2004)

Jeff Encke is going to get us all arrested. He has taken the current war as an opportunity to express an erotic ('Who brought me to this / this chair / engulfing my childs body, / to this bent position) and Christian ('we speak openly of taboos, / keeping the heads of our enemies closest, / and fresh) modern love that is eccentric, original, and possibly traitorous. How do we love our enemies? Like lovers? Encke walks a tightrope between empathy and promiscuity, using poetry as a means of addressing love 'objects who have not only become dehumanized, but who have also carried out their own regime of dehumanization. His poems are a primer course on how to stay human in a dark time."

-- Tony Tost, winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award from The Academy of American Poets and author of Invisible Bride (Louisiana State University Press, 2002)

Most Wanted plays an inspired, surprising set of riffs on the bromide 'Make Love, Not War.' Jeff Encke dares us to see the war of the human heart as darker and more disjointed than the war of nations, the love of war as simpler and safer than the love of people, and the power of words as more intricate and uncertain than any military policy. The changing script of love that emerges every time his pack of elliptic fragments is shuffled and a new game of poetic poker is played helps to restore human individuality, vulnerability, and contingency to a world in which we can never wish to imprison whatever it is we most want."

PRESS CONTACT:
Jeffrey Encke
Author, Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse
Last Tangos Editions
PMB 432
4742 42nd Avenue SW
Seattle, WA 98116-4553
URL: www.matlub.net
Phone: (206) 550-0582

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