Burning Babies

Generally, and usually in an almost hidden rule, I don't like to write reviews of books within this blog. This blog is my place to experiment, to mess with forms, twiddle ideas, and tease paragraphs into giving up the goods. But I have finally read Noah Cicero's Burning Babies, and I feel the need to write about it.

Burning Babies is a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in how it's been held back, but don't think it's got the same acceptability through pleasantries of niceness that Wilco has. Burning Babies is harsh, but it's grittier than Noah's previous collection (The Condemned). The Condemned was a wonderful read, but there seemed to be this underlining desire for an acceptance within the tales, with Burning Babies there is no desire for any hope to be at the end. This is a book of wallowing in a rusted cemetery city life, much of which has the same backdrop I had growing up in Youngstown, Ohio. This book is about merely existing.

After all the issues of a publisher putting the release on hold for whatever reason publishers have, Noah Cicero has put out a part of Burning Babies onto a print-on-demand site.The book is printed in a form larger than writing paper, and because of that there is no way to read the book in public without feeling like a madman simply due to the size of it. You can't just sit in a coffee shop and tilt your chair back and enjoy. If you do that people will come up and ask if you are reading a script, or possibly a published police report of a killer never caught. Burning Babies is meant to be consumed; the best way I found was the lurch over it, as it lays on a table and just go into the world of its stories.

In the last day I have read the final story more times that I can remember. To call the final story a "fuck you" would be an understatement. The final story is simply a statement from Noah Cicero that he is not settling, espically when it comes to pleasing the assholes that somehow live in this world unharmed. All I can say is I can't wait for the full book to one day be released.

Burning Babies