The philosophy behind the by-now-familiar Gen X posture is that the only way to protect yourself from cliché and pretension is to refer frequently to the silliest pop-culture material you can get your mittens on. You can’t be pretentious if you constantly quote from The Brady Bunch. At their best, a writer, songwriter, or filmmaker can reshape familiar material and make it compelling in spite of, or because of, its very silliness. At their worst, such artists’ works are just plain silly.

David McGimpsey is the author of two previous collections of poetry and a critical study of baseball, and his pop culture credentials are fully on display in Hamburger Valley, California. Movie stars have been commodified in “nice at any price,” which invents “Linda Tripp’s licorice whip” and “Wesley Snipes handiwipes.” The poems of Hamburger Valley are the type that go over very well at readings, because they make the audience feel in on the joke. Perhaps this is why McGimpsey’s song lyrics are so successful – we feel we know the friendly smartass at the microphone. (His “Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ by Frank Sinatra” is downright hilarious.)

But dismissing Hamburger Valley as a David Letterman monologue in verse would be selling it short. For every reference to 1970s television and bad-hair bands, there are also plenty of “high culture” allusions, from Baudelaire to Gustav Mahler. More importantly, there is substance beneath the style, a sense of loneliness and urban desolation that begins to make the collection feel quite dark once the veneer of ketchup is wiped away.

But its hard not to wish that McGimpsey challenged the slick persona of these poems a bit more frequently. The poems that do so – the long poem “The Inaugural Poem of the Los Angeles Subway System” in particular – reveal a superior critical intelligence capable of remaking the world of television into serious poetry.