The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar by Quincy R. Lehr (review)

Judging from the title, you might think Quincy R. Lehr’s The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar might be filled with whimsical dark humor. While there are plenty of lines evoking laughter, the tone is never exactly light-hearted nor is the dark humor alleviated by any promises of something better. Instead, we laugh at the lines describing pathetic, sexual desperation or the brutalities of empire-building in acknowledgment of our own fallen states. It may be somehow comforting to know that others feel just as jaded as we do. Many of the poems create unstable ironies that arise from irreconcilable emotions, such as the tension between wanting to believe in something that you reject or the disappointment in failing to derive comfort from deeply desired experiences. Throughout the collection, the past haunts the present, as both childhood memories and ancient narratives, both now eschewed, affect the consciousness of the narrative voice. Yet no matter how bleak the outlook of the book becomes, there is not a sense of despair, but rather a sense of hurt, an assertion that life does not have to be as unfulfilling as it is.

Sexual desire in a dehumanized world forms one of the central motifs of the collection. In “The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar,” a man lands at an airport while awakening from a sexual dream. He then drives to a tiki bar through

[...] a billboard sea of kitsch along the access road—corrupted signs and semiotics. Pad Thai. An English pub. Se habla Español. You’ll never find a better deal on brand-new furniture!

Once at the bar, “a relic of a previous century” with “Oriental peaks” dominating the strip mall, he orders a Mai Tai and scopes out the place. The combination of tired post-colonial aesthetics, clichéd post-modern tropes, and dull, crass capitalism inform the sexual conquest he hopes will take place. Near the end of the poem a woman—little more than a colonized body—dances for leering men: “Consuela does the hula—half burlesque, / half pastiche Hawaiian, with a splash / of Carmen Miranda in the mix. She sighs. / One brown skin’s like another.” Sex is little more than a transaction between two people of unequal power. Other poems also give accounts of people suffering from weltschmerz. “Left on Mission and Revenge” contains an image of an old man lusting for sex while simultaneously fearing “becoming flaccid” or catching an STD. Sex is compared to “a Savior—/ or is it daily bread,” but this sexual satisfaction fails to arrive: “he fails to note his zipper / is firmly still in place—/ a sin that never happened, a voided fall from grace.” Here, sex is simultaneously a sin and an act of redemption, an inversion of values the man both embraces and rejects. The man, far past his sexual prime, is effectively emasculated and unable to control either his desires or his state of unwanted celibacy.

Throughout the volume, Lehr highlights examples of the inequality upon which our society is built. However, his political statements are never didactic or hackneyed. As with “The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar,” his most political poem, “Avast!” addresses issues of colonialism. He imagines corsairs from the Barbary States attacking Washington, D.C. and envisions the assailants in a comically anachronistic scene: “all turbans, cutlasses, and crescent flags, / salty curses shouted at frightened aides / as Barbary sets forth for its revenge.” This humorous fantasy of early nineteenth-century pirates exacting revenge upon modern-day America, with all of its military and economic might, highlights the inability of the colonized peoples of the world to fight back whenever the US invades. America is the power that “maintain[s] / the weighted scale, the fixed rate of exchange,” and any attempt to fight against this is, sadly, a joke. Still, much like the old man lusting for sex, the speaker in this poem continues to fantasize about what he knows will never happen.

Throughout this collection, the speakers...