Modern Habitual Disenchantment: A Review

Modern Habitual Disenchantment or MHD is a collection of poems by Joshua Deeds AKA DurtyDeeds93, it’s a collection of free verse, with at least one entry embrace qualifying as short prose.  It’s on Googleplay and priced at $1. The poems are broken down into three collections connected loosely by subject matter. Those collections are Pain, Disillusioned and Anger. There are common themes and language in all three but each has a different target and so offers some variety.

Pain:

The poems collected under pain are appropriately painful to read, I mean that in a good way.  They share a narrative of a relationship breakdown -possibly more than one- from the point of view of one of the survivors, and it does feel like the character (possibly the author, the details and vivid language seem to be coming from a personal place) is surviving a traumatic episode. The tone is bitter and the language vulgar and angry.
I don’t usually care for this sort of poetry but the pace and the fact that Deeds manages to resist the temptation to use fancy `romantic` words and sticks to language a normal human being would use in this situation helped draw me in. Deeds also has a gift for creating images with his words, I was constantly picturing a dark mostly empty home covered in wrappers and used comic books with knocked over picture frames.

“Your morality is a cover for something deeper, darker and sinister.
Your generosity is tainted with emotional baggage, despair and hate.
Cracks are showing.”

Disillusioned:

Disillusioned is a shorter section and a bit different. It retains the bitterness but targets American society, or more accurately what American society is alleged to be. Attacks on Patriotism, war, politicians and the callous attitudes to the poor and downtrodden all feature prominently. Read together Disillusioned tells the story of a man learning his beliefs are myths and the reality is a lot uglier then he imagined.

“We have created something ugly
A War based Republic,
A 21st Century Weimar.”

A loss of innocence that leads us to

Anger:

Subject wise anger is a mix of the previous too sections, though the title is appropriate. Individual poems expose a rage and frustration within that depending on the poem is either directed at elements of society or a person they were once very close too. And a reiteration of that characters determination to survive and get through these events and possible extract some payback. It’s a confused and disjointed section, but Anger is a confusing and disjointed emotion flicking through targets and responses as and when they present themselves.

“I have a fascination with the dangerous
Knives, Swords and Modern Cavalry.
Why?
I persist. I study, I become, I am.”

Overall I endured MHD I think most who give it a chance will too, some of the language in some of the poems may be a bit too crude and the imagery a bit too violent for some though. If you’re the type of person who believes poetry should be about beauty and warmth I’d advise looking elsewhere there’s not much warmth and beauty to be found here.