by Nicole Yurcaba
If the reading requirements of the traditional literary canon have you down and you’re looking for a pop-culture laden interpretation of some of the most revered literature in history, then a great beginning point for you is Kernpunkt Press’s gem, A Book about Myself Called Hell. Jared Joseph’s work blends the best of satirical humor with the darkest elements of one’s psyche to create a unique interpretation of one of the most widely read and widely taught pieces of literature known to humankind. However, despite the popularity of The Inferno, readers have to admit that unless one is well-versed in the (often confusing) layers of Catholicism and the Catholic Church, Dante’s most famous work leaves readers feeling like they’ve taken a horrific acid trip into Satan’s bowels. A Book about Myself Called Hell embraces that confusion rather than try to dispel it by fusing the most tangible elements of The Inferno with pop culture references and a Harold-and-Kumar-like relationship between Dante and Virgil.
The book opens with a section titled “Poem Summary,” which bears one of the most humorous lines ever written: “At the age of 35 on the night of Good Friday in the year 1300 Dante decides to go glamping in a state park and to have a vision quest.” The success of these lines is that Joseph portrays Dante in Millennial terms, and readers may even begin to wonder if the book isn’t going to develop into an allegorical commentary about the financial, professional, and social struggles reducing Millennials to ashen states of their former selves. From there, Dante’s journey unfolds into a Millennial throwback session: the narrator informs the reader Dante isn’t alone; he’s met the dead ghost Virgil. The narrator also informs readers that Indiana Jones, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Star Wars, and Dogma are all hero quests.
Pop culture is only one of the book’s levels, however. The seemingly never-ending Covid-19 pandemic is another. The narrator describes Virgil as “hoarse,” so “Dante decides it isn’t a viral thing and pulls his mask down.” Later in “Poem Summary,” the narrator interjects, “My mom contracts Covid-19. She is very immunocompromised.” Amid a liturgy of characters like Cleopatra, readers find the narrator admitting “I’m texting all my exes asking if they are alive, got virus’d, and they are, and they haven’t, in that order, and apparently we all still care, and we do not dare hell.”
In other cantos, the writing strays from the humorous and into the philosophical. In “Canto VIII,” readers find tiny, noteworthy blurbs glimmering like glamp-lights in the dark: “How to make this relevant, that the funniest things in life are also hell? That we try to wrest hell from the serious and render it comic gold? That only the most traumatic can be sublimated to the most comedic?” At other points, this philosophical nature combines with a poesy unseen in the majority of the collection: “Water is important here; water is important everywhere. Dante hears a waterfall that sounds like a beehive, which is surprisingly terrifying.” The book even concludes on a philosophical note, with the narrator contemplating stars, and whether or not “it’s really only metaphorical to call a star alive or dead” and maybe it’s only metaphorical to do so “because of the confusion of past light reaching the present eye causes.” Ultimately, what the book may be asking of readers is to question whether or not they themselves are alive or dead.
Nonetheless, that’s not the book’s end. Instead of a traditional conclusion, readers find a multiple choice section housing nine questions and their potential answers. Readers can find the correct answer in the inverted footnotes, which read like part explanation for historical lessons and part personal narratives or poems.
A Book about Myself Called Hell isn’t for faint readers. It’s bold and cunning, clever and radical. It will make readers laugh out loud and simultaneously feel dirty, which isn’t horrible to do, because as the book pushes readers toward discomfort, it asks them to consider the fringes and encourages them to visit for a while.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
