Towards a Poetry of the Absurd

In their collaborative poetry, Dustin Junkert and Shane Moritz drag the compositional practice of Exquisite Corpse kicking and screaming into the 21st century; they finish each other’s sentences with often preposterous élan. Their subjects are projectiles of varying gravity launched at a Ouija board planchette; the scenarios they unfold describe a universe of pop-culture misunderstandings. Somewhere at the intersection of David Berman, Anne Sexton, Robert Pinsky, and Stephen Malkmus lies the lyrebird glory of these poems, their impact amplified by David Nichols’s original drawings, whose air of tender perplexity provides a perfect emotional accompaniment.

“In The Book of Treasures, curators Dustin Junkert and Shane Moritz expertly constitute a kickass hyper-contemporary below-the-bug-line Cabinet of Wonders.
—MICHAEL MARTONE​​​​​​​

Shane Moritz and Dustin Junkert met in 2013 while in graduate school at Georgia College & State University, where they fell into the habit of writing over each other’s stories and poems as they passed the time in one of the town’s few bars. At first it was an If I were writing it, I’d probably say this . . . type of thing—handwritten changes to printed drafts smudged with tzatziki. Although they owed allegiance to different literary schools, they tended to agree on the best punch lines, and wound up accepting each other’s mocking overwrites often enough that they started to work together this way intentionally. It was amusing for each of them to hand over a draft and see what the other brought to it, until each piece eventually morphed into something for which neither was solely responsible. The final product became known as a shanedunk and the process as dunking—both terms coined by their poetry professor, Laura Newbern, whose influence rages here. Our heroes later moved to different cities, but the dunking continued whenever they met up, in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, Baltimore.

As soon as they saw the illustrations David Nichols proposed for their poems, the authors were convinced that The Book of Treasures would not be complete without them; the melancholy vision expressed in his artwork draws out the tenderness underlying even their most unhinged scenarios.

Junkert was born in Tacoma, Washington, and now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works in marketing. Moritz was born in Portland, spent his formative years in Australia, and lives in Baltimore, where he teaches writing at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County. David Nichols is a writer and artist who teaches urban history at the University of Melbourne; his most recent book is Persiflage, a graphic novel.