Excellent Eggs and Hot Dogs, by Joe Knapp

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Excellent Eggs and Hot Dogs is both a polemic on a civilized life, and an escapist's cry of despair. Beginning in a dreary Midwest, the reader will follow an uncomfortable narrator as they attempt to find for themselves a more fulfilling existence. Exploring themes of industrialism, impermanence, aesthetic dissonance, and ultimately dereliction, this collection of poems amounts to little more than the whinings of a tired vagrant. This collection is, in essence, a documentation of a perspective that evolves in our narrator as they travel across the United States. Jaded by the working world, they attempt to flee to a simpler life in the desert, only to find that the heaviest baggage that one carries is quite unrelated to physical location. Joe Knapp lives and writes in some jalopy as he floats around the United States avoiding gainful employment when possible. Dishonorably discharged from the National Park Service in 2021, he now spends the majority of his time climbing rocks and smoking excessively. His work has been published by Popular Mechanics, U-Bahn Literary, and The Hut Smut Review, two literary magazines of which he has served as editor-in-chief.