The surreal, tender and completely original poems that comprise Tony Leuzzi's Fake Book are anything but what such a title might approximate. These riffs on, among other things, what classic American song titles may conjure in the mind of the believer are so authoritative and yet delicate in their invention and occasional whimsy, that I found myself entering another world, another language: almost like earth, almost like English. These are poems (and fantastic prose poems that take up the last section of the book) that praise all kinds of “returns”: to the self, to the community, with a kind of deliberation and ferocity that we used to call moral responsibility. --Michael Klein Drawing on the chromatics of a fake book that contains melodies and essential chords, Tony Leuzzi composes spare, elegant, and elliptical poems. I enjoyed this book. --Arthur SzeS J Fowler's Minimum Security Prison Dentistry available now. Click here for more information and to purchase. "If you think poetry is some sedate pursuit carried out in an ivory tower then you obviously ain't read Steven Fowler. He makes Bukowski look like Billy Childish and Billy Childish look like William McGonagall!" Stewart Home
"Imagine a Boys Own Paper landscape with True Crime architecture. Laurence Harvey dodges from building to country trying to evade CCTV whose sound footage runs through Babelfish. The smells are Jack London, the light is Genet and the memories are Edgar Lee Masters. Equally in words is Steven Johannes Fowler's Minimum Security Prison Dentistry: elegant, coldly funny, at times emotional, textured with occasional accidental/intentional solecisms; but getting the work done. Nowadays most pages labelled "poetry" are unreadable and uninteresting: these give hope. Anyone who can name-check Joe Arpaio and Jacky le Mat, and reference the cover-texture of an Anselm Hollo book from the sixties rides my particular range." Tom Raworth
“This could be the worst book you will read this year, the discussion is violence, but really it’s a punch from a cup cake, using narrative and expressionist syntax. His celebration of where is, has a clipped disgust.” Allen Fisher
“Punchy, lyrical, and incandescently inventive, by turns surreal and disarmingly direct, these kaleidoscopic poems enter the house of prison language via the back door and take no hostages. If Captain Beefheart had done St. Quentin, the result might have sounded something like this.” Philip Terry |
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