Listen to it while reading the libretto. Words and music consistently surprising and inventive but also dislocating in the extreme: it’s all a joke, it’s not a joke at all.

A recent editorial from John Minichillo, a member of Fictionaut’s Board of Advisors, serves as a great introduction to Fictionaut’s beautiful new world. He takes the long-view, placing Fictionaut in the context of “an ongoing writer’s renaissance” that he dates at ”about one hundred years.” He sees a confluence of technology and events in the publishing industry that have positioned Fictionaut to provide a platform for those who have “devoted (their) lives to writing (to enjoy) the privilege of being read.”

While like Whitman, Tinkers does contain multitudes, it does not possess much by way of traditional plot. It is a meditation on life and time. It is the deathbed mental dismantling of a life and the lives that led to it; it is a skilled second-generation tinker taking his 80 years apart in hopes that it all might be put back together again in some working order. “The wonder of anything was that it was made in the first place,” George’s father, Howard, tells us in what may be a memory. “What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?”

I say it may be a memory, because the third person narration jumps, like Billy Pilgrim, randomly through time. And occasionally moves to both first and second person. And incorporates the language and rhythms of antecedent eras and outside texts (including the wholly fictionalized and wonderful 1783 Reasonable Horologist pamphlet by the Rev. Kenner Davenport). Yet the parts making up these parts—Paul Harding’s words holding this story in place—are masterful. It becomes evident early in these pages that Tinkers is a finely crafted matrix of inter-working parts that add to something truly remarkable.

These poems are careful and tight. Martinez Pompa gives entire worlds in 16 lines or less. He gets in and out just that fast. He makes you feel chest-heavy sadness, nostalgia, arousal, and fear. He takes your hand and shows you characters: some you know and some you don’t want to know; some are you. These poems are beautiful and raking all at once. In “The Body as Weapon, as Inspiration,” Martinez Pompa reincarnates the past ugliness of every repetitive conflict, proving that violence breeds itself:

The body as weapon, as inspiration
when she walks into a Jerusalem market
and explodes herself. Not so much
the explosive force, but the shrapnel

a year ago that tore through her
mother’s chest and maimed her
brother’s legs.

Martinez Pompa keeps his readers aware of their role, and his own,

There will be retaliation strikes,

missile bombardments, another round
of bulldozers. And there will be a poet
thousands of mils away, excited
by the burden of writing this thing.

But these poems are rebellious and sarcastic, too. They’re funny the way John Stewart is funny: because you know he’s right. In “Manifesto,” Martinez Pompa warns, “Soon you will wake to the ruckus of reggaeton, / the boom of banda, the clatter of millions of little brown feet in-/ vading your schools, wherein anyone caught learning English will / be charged with treason and deported.” And then he urges, “Illegals of all countries, Unite!” These are poems to pass around—to teach and learn—to see and study and appreciate.