A Review of Wolfgang Carstens' "Rented Mule" (by nadine Sellers)

Canadian writer Wolfgang Carstens ‘The Prolific’ has once more taken to the edge of the plebeian plight; from there peering over the abyss of cement cityscapes, entering the daily drudge to sink into the dregs of multiple shifts. Shifts of moods, shifts of needs that rise and fall with necessity at the heels of poetic brevity. This book, under the seal of NightBallet Press.

Carstens’ acuity, finds the detail like that of the great and the dead  who have brought us to deep and sad recognition of the human comedy. The artistic duo of writer and illustrator leads to the perfect distortion of word and line, rounded, lean or bloated. As if Janne Karlsson had been sitting in the security booth of the supermarket, capturing residual humor from the mindless breath beneath..

All these bipeds rolling around circular lives that lead right back to comfort foods, comfort gadgets, in discomfort of uniform apparel for the sake of pretense, existence. The hierarchy of the workplace runs by in concentric pressure down to the least and latest “rented mule”. It chokes the word out of the poet and the line out of the artist in softly delivered jabs; oh what a clean and blunt object, the pen and the pencil!