Sommer Browning’s chapbook Vale Tudo published by Jen Tynes’s Horse Less Press is the perfect chapbook for the season of road trips. Though the poem series is named for a Brazilian “anything goes” unarmed fighting style, the poems themselves are situated in the common markers of American travel—that sense that some things are the same everywhere in their blandness—like hotel rooms and shopping malls. The speaker of the poems is reassuringly jaded by all these scenes, and even when the narrator and her boyfriend arrive at their presumed destination—the Walt Whitman historic site—she seems as much fascinated by the Walt Whitman Mall as the historic site itself, which they don’t even bother to go into:

The building is boring. The parking lot is boring. The wet birds are boring. The rain is boring. The vines disguised as telephone wires are boring. The cars are boring. The red fence around the place is boring. The low clouds are boring, the way they threaten is boring. Walt Whitman, we are sorry we missed UFC: 62.

In compliment to the title, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) reoccurs throughout the series as the travelers also journey on a quest for hotel motels with pay-per-view. Browning’s style is exacting and straightforward, and like the settings it describes, is necessarily repetitive. Even the fights are repetitive: “Because I have a boyfriend and because he has a VCR I cannot miss anything.” The poems accurately depict the mundane aspects of road trips with just enough of an acerbic twist to make it interesting. While it seems like the speaker of these poems travels with shrugged shoulders, she’s an incredibly observant traveling companion:

The lobby was the lobby of a plush planet of businessmen and servants. There was a bar. When a beer bottle scuttled across a table, a silk tie squeaked loose. The concierge came back; the news was grim. A child with a buoyant noodle walked by in her underpants, I noticed the staff using fake British accents.