Fake Book is a love letter to love letters.  Leuzzi shapes his book according to ways romance occurs in language, the images and also the rhythms.  The whispering intensities of Georg Trakl and the well-worn phrases and rhythms of The American Songbook are metaphors for private and public emotions and springboards for improvisation.  The poetry they generate seems to exist in the moment of its invention, which makes a kind of joy and celebration.  The reader is both lover and beloved in these lovely songs.    

--Robert Glück

Imagine channeling Frank O’Hara, Georg Trakl, William Carlos Williams and Coyote (both the Native American trickster variety and the Looney Tunes, Wile E. variety).  Unlikely? Incongruous?  Impossible?  Perhaps, but that’s precisely what Tony Leuzzi has accomplished in Fake Book, a collection of poems that sometimes evoke the urban and playful nonchalance of O’Hara, the unsettling gravitas of Trakl, the imagistic and sometimes melancholic detail of Williams, and/or the comic mischievousness of Coyote.  This is a beautiful, funny and elegiac book: “If the actual is to be catalogued, we must improvise reality, as if it were a garland made of green construction paper,” writes Leuzzi in one of many prose poems.  And, later, in a homophonic translation of Trakl: “At what point does a word, any word—rouse or flight— / cease claiming what it means and become?”  From fabulist allegories to explorations in consciousness to love poems, Leuzzi has masterfully re-envisioned the ‘fake book.’

--Mark Tursi

 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.