Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin, had fired from just off Juan's shoulder. As Kennedy grabbed it, Juan heard a bang and felt a flash of heat against his face. "People were six and seven deep," Juan says, but he got close enough to stick out his hand. This man was going to be the next president, Juan thought, and he wanted to see if he could shake his hand once more. Juan, who wanted to congratulate him, used his skinny frame to knife through the pressed bodies. He made his victory speech at the Ambassador and headed through the kitchen to escape the crush of people, but there was a crowd in there too. The next night, Kennedy won the California primary. "I walked out of there 20 feet tall, thinking, 'I'm not just a busboy, I'm a human being.' He made me feel that way." "He shook my hand as hard as anyone had ever shaken it," Juan says. I'll pay you too.' "Ī Kennedy assistant answered the door of the Presidential Suite, and Juan, his eyes wide, pushed the food cart into the room and found himself standing next to Kennedy. We are all complicit in busboy democracy, whether we want to be or not."He wouldn't do it," Juan remembers of his stubborn colleague. Through Guenette’s adroit and surprising verse, social critique and quixotic imagery do a double team, and when the main busser dozens us by saying “Your mother was a busboy,” the call-out is complete. Matthew Guenette’s funky, funny collection, American Busboy, isn’t about “the flawed /democracy of lobster tanks,” but it could be if the lobsters were replaced with grumbling busboys and the tank was exchanged for The Clam Shack!, a restaurant that “drags its tired butt, but /never shuts its smack-talk mouth.” In these incisive poems, untouchable waitresses step on the heads of busboys while cultural luminaries like Dorothy, Rilke, and Al Pacino revel in their own busboy aspirations. Sandra Beasley, author of I Was the Jukebox “The restaurant needed / a spanking all morning,” is the brassy declaration of “National Ice Cream Sandwich Day,” “& would need a good spanking /all summer long.” Using irreverent humor, clever lineation, formal invention, and alliteration worthy of Chaucer, American Busboy cuts to the front of the line for the attention of any lover of fresh, funny-yet movingly vulnerable-contemporary poetry. In this book’s world, “the restaurant /never asked you to /imagine imaginary /things like the brittle / bones of onion rings.” Instead, a manager sticks his hand first in the breader, then the Frialator, just to prove a point on another night, a middle-aged waitress gets taken home via a dirt road. With no apologies and with no mercy, but with an electrifying degree of lyric energy, Matthew Guenette brings the mindset of a stifled serving class to life in American Busboy. David Kirby, author of Talking About Movies with Jesus But aren’t we all busboys? Aren’t we all essential to the hum of daily life? Aren’t we all unsung? Don’t we all put cornstarch in our polyester pants to keep from getting a butt rash? The next time you’re chowing down at The Clam Shack! and some pimply teenager or schoolteacher working a second job staggers by with a trayful of dirty dishes, you’ll remember these ballsy, all-American poems and think, poetry in motion. When he says Jesus is a busboy, it sounds like a prayer. When Matthew Guenette says your mother is a busboy, it sounds like an insult.
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