Book Review: The Whiskey Mule Diner Anthology Swerves Through the Gutter and the Divine

This modern poetry collection doesn’t walk, it staggers, bleeds, and sometimes howls like a late-night preacher with whiskey breath. The Whiskey Mule Diner Anthology (Fevers of the Mind) is a raucous tribute to Tom Waits, but don’t mistake it for a fanboy mixtape. It’s a cracked mirror held up to the American underbelly, a clattering of voices all drawing from the same poisoned well. What you get isn’t reverence, it’s revelry, decay, memory, and myth, all slopped into the same greasy spoon booth.

The anthology’s tone is set hard and fast with O’Nan’s The Whiskey Mule Diner (on Caroline Street). Here, O’Nan delivers not a poem but a full cinematic reel of urban rot and resurrection. “The diner’s lights are blinking an epileptic fury,” he writes, and that fury pulses through every image that follows: “crooked mayor”, “ripped pantyhose legends”, and “hash browns in your hair”. The writing plays on excess but never gets lazy, this is not indulgent grime, it’s considered chaos. O’Nan’s surreal layering of characters and decay echoes Waits without mimicry. It’s a spiritual cousin, not a karaoke number.

Merritt Waldon’s A Series of Small Poems Inspired by Tom Waits brings a different texture, fragmented, dream-drunk, and volatile. “trickling haphazard tongue against labia minora / of Memory & History,” he writes in a line that dares you to flinch. Waldon isn’t here for the well-behaved reader. He’s plunging his fists into the surreal with lines that operate more like riffs than narratives. These poems read like smoke signals from the back of a peyote trip. They don’t always land, but when they do, the impact is carnal and uncanny.

Rp Verlaine’s contributions (notably Beating a Hustler and Shattering the Nerves) showcase the anthology’s tonal breadth and its allegiance to a kind of noir despair. In Beating a Hustler, Verlaine doesn’t dress up his rage: “let the pool stick become a splintered puzzle across his face.” The line is violent, sure, but it’s also tightly controlled, there’s an economy of language that gives the poem its weight. Similarly, in Shattering the Nerves, repetition drives home the psychic unraveling. These poems don’t just depict breakdowns, they drag you through them.

If there’s one misstep in the collection, it’s that not all pieces maintain the intensity or originality of the strongest voices. Some poems drift into vague nostalgia or generic homage, which dilutes the sting. But the collection is smartly sequenced, so the lesser entries are quickly sandwiched between poems that restore the edge. And when the anthology swings back with a piece like Jason Ryberg’s Dinner With the Devil (Sleight Return), all stormfront swagger and apocalyptic banter, it reminds you this is not a polite dinner party. It’s a séance, a brawl, a prayer with a busted lip.

Within the broader context of contemporary poetry, The Whiskey Mule Diner Anthology feels both timely and timeless. It resists the squeaky-clean trend of MFA minimalism and instead plants itself in the lineage of Bukowski, Wanda Coleman, and of course, Waits himself. For readers of contemporary poetry craving grit over gloss, this is essential reading. It also says something vital about independent publishing, namely, that it’s the only space where work this jagged and unmarketable can thrive. These poems don’t care about your Instagram-friendly haikus. They care about truth, and they’ll crawl through broken glass to find it.