I'm honored & thrilled to share this generous review my publisher received for my most recent collection:
Classic Plastic by Parker Tettleton (Ravenna Press, 56 pp., 2025).
George Myers Jr.
In Classic Plastic, Parker Tettleton makes the sentence his unit of obsession. His prose poems are short, self-aware, and structurally transparent — many announce their own logic upfront: "The first sentence is about you. The second sentence is about me." This isn't naivety; it's a constraint, the way a sonnet's turn is a constraint. You're immediately inside a relational geometry, and the poem's work is to see what pressure that geometry can bear.
The method is minimalist but not thin. "The first sentence is a shower. The second sentence is you in the shower” — one sentence names, the next displaces, and something opens. The shift is almost too small to call a move, yet it lands. Tettleton builds the collection out of accumulations like this, betting that readers will tune to his frequency if he stays consistent enough, long enough. And it’s embracing, fun, and deeply relational.
The tone helps. The language is conversational and conspicuously free of ornament. When a line like "An ambulance can only go so fast" appears, it's left to stand without commentary. That restraint — the refusal to press or explain — is where the book earns its confidence. Tettleton trusts the statement and trusts the reader. The result is a humor that functions less as relief valve than as mode: "This sentence is about everything" lands as a knowing wink at the collection's own scale, a gesture that's comfortable with its limits rather than embarrassed by them.
Nearly every prose poem addresses a "you," keeping the distance intimate, and the sentences are always oriented toward or away from connection — reaching, deferring, stopping mid-motion. "I stopped mid-sentence" doesn't need elaboration because the hesitation is the point. Tettleton knows when to leave a gap.
The tonal comparisons are to Lydia Davis, Mary Ruefle, and James Tate (especially his Ghost Soldiers or Return to the City of White Donkeys). Like Davis, Tettleton works at extreme compression, where meaning hinges on minor tonal adjustments. Like Ruefle, the work retains warmth and presence. Like Tate, lightness is a structural choice, not an evasion— the humor keeps the poems mobile even when the subject matter turns heavier. What distinguishes Tettleton is consistency of pitch: The premise stays fixed, but it doesn't calcify. Each poem finds a marginally different angle on the same problem, and the collection's pleasure is cumulative: You start reading for the individual poem and end up reading for the pattern.
Classic Plastic isn't a book that announces its ambitions. It's quiet, controlled, and deliberately modest in scope. But it does what it sets out to do with real precision, and by the end we’re trained to notice exactly the kinds of small movements — a redirect, a reframe, one sentence leaning into another, a convening — that Tettleton has been practicing all along. Let’s just say it, Classic Plastic, fantastic.
