One of the most engaging poems in Mark Bibbins’s smart and enjoyable third book of poetry, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, is “Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No.1,” the first of a series of six such poems, and which opens with these lines: “First I was fellating an African despot / for his diamonds, next I was paying / a hooker to give me back / my teeth.” When first encountering lines like these, you can’t necessarily be blamed for wondering who still cares about irony and “soft surrealism” (a phenomenon in which strange events occur that seem to invoke surrealism or the absurd, but with little to no substantive socio-political or ontological substance), particularly given the overabundance and the poor h
