Brian Fugett edited by Alethia Drehmer and Michele McDannold, Citizens for Decent Literature, distributed by Magical Jeep, 2025, 194 pages, $18.

This memorial collection for poet and editor Brian Fugett is clearly a labor of love.  Alethia Drehmer, in particular, has painstakingly tracked down Fugett’s poems on blog posts, Facebook and in handwritten drafts to assemble this volume. She should be commended for this heroic effort. Fugett was a small press editor, Zygote in My Coffee is the mag I remember the best which McDannold co-edited. He was clearly much more than an editor and poet as he was a cherished a friend to many and is sorely missed by all. Despite urgings from his friends and fellow poets, Fugett never assembled, and rarely published his work, hence the editorial sleuthing by the editors. 

Brian’s themes are straightforward with no bullshit about them: this is who I am and this is what I do. He likes bars, booze (Vodka seems to be his weapon of choice) and babes. There is a lot of casual sex, overindulgence, and more than a few hangovers. Some of these are laugh out loud funny especially the longer, fuller ones towards the beginning of the collection. If I were to have an objection it would be that many of the shorter ones towards the end feel like casual pieces that were never meant to be published in a collected poems.  There is a certain amount of repetition to these lesser works, but it is what it is; who among us has never written a dud poem?  One thing above all is clear, Brain Fugett loved life, that life as expressed in these poems.  We are all diminished by his dying way too young.

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Ayler Roskos, Dream of the Future, Red Fuzz Rat Media (Iniquity Press, Vendetta Books), 2026, no price listed, inquire at Roskos PO Box 2008, Brick, NJ 08732, also available from Lulu.

Talk about a labor of love. Editor/poet Dave Roskos had two sons both of whom died by the age of 30 from complications associated with Muscular Dystrophy.  Ayler was the youngest and he didn’t let his disabilities interfere with his activism. Jim Cohn remembrance of Ayler is an informative introduction that sets the tone for the collection. Just because a person’s body is deteriorating doesn’t mean that his mind isn’t working as well as any healthy person. Several accompanying photos show Ayler at No Kings Rally in 2025, protesting with his dad, with other disabled people, as he is standing up, figuratively, for their rights to survive. When the Doge maniacs took their chainsaw to health and human service people like Ayler lose their benefits. And their right to live.  Ayler was only 28 when he died but he made a lasting impression leaving behind a substantial body of written work, poetic and prose essays, all gathered in this collection by his father. We should all leave behind such a lasting legacy.

Disability does
not discriminate
unlike the
Republicans
who want to
get rid of
Medicaid for
the disabled,
the children,
& the elderly…

while United
Health and others
make billions.
Replacing healthcare
with wealthcare has
always been
the Republican
wet dream

(from Disability and Healthcare)

Tony Gloeggler, Here on Earth, NYQ Books, www.nyq.org, available on Amazon, 2025, 138 pages, $21.95.

Reading Tony Gloeggler is like engaging in a discussion with someone you’ve known all your life, maybe grew up with, saw around the neighborhood, but only got to know well as an adult.  Tony is a real neighborhood guy, mostly Queens, where he has spent most of his life, who played hoops on the city courts, stickball in the street, ring o livio as well as all the other childhood games involving the kids on the block. Mostly, though, he dreamed of being a Yankee. 

Where Tony grew up, the question would be, Yanks or Mets?  As this is Queens we’re talking about, most of the answers would be Mets, and if you were a little older it would be the Brooklyn Dodgers but the Yanks?  Tony is, if nothing else, his own person. Hell, what kid growing up in the 70’s didn’t want to play for the Yanks? I mean, The Mets, seriously?  Hey 1969, baby. But that’s the Mets fan talking not the author. Mets fans don’t count rings talking to Yankee fans.

Tony’s writing is intimate. The poems are all no frill narratives. There are no gimmicks, forms, elaborate metaphors, there are just the stories with a recurring cast of characters. There is the family, the somewhat distant, sometimes hostile father, and the long-suffering mother who was much beloved by her three children. As adults Tony, his brother, and sister all took shifts providing homecare for a stubborn, 93 mother in her last days of decline. Tony describes in details the nature of the care the children provide. There is no judgments, just description. It’s what you do for the parent you love who nurtured and provided for you.

Care is what Tony did all of his adult, working life, until he was forced to retired due to severe kidney disease that eventually required a transplant. Years of dialysis culminated in an organ transplant (a kidney was  provided by his brother,) and he was able to resume a normal life. His poems in an earlier NYQ collection about dialysis are harrowing, though in this collection, he mostly focuses on the adult home for mentally challenged adults he managed.

Equally as important, is his relationship with an ex’s autistic son.  Tony relates to Jesse as an adoptive father would, assuming a parental role continues even now as the boy is an adult. Every month this non-driver treks to Maine for a highly regimented weekend visits.

Through the poems about daily life in the adult facility, we learn about the men he worked with, Larry, and Robert and Lee, whose lives are so intertwined with his they begin to feel like part of an extended family. In a very real way, they are. A poem near the end of the collection sites an empty chair at the annual BBQ as an honorable place for the departed Larry, Tony’s favorite, who passed away during Covid.  In the simplest way, Tony expresses a deep grief felt for this man he helped care for during his decades at the facility.

Similarly, poems about the death of his best friend, NYQ poet Ted Jonathan, are told. Tony feels a certain amount of survivor’s guilt for not having recognized Ted’s suicidal impulses and done something to prevent his taking his own life, are not overwrought or sentimental, just deeply felt.

Tony is not given to overt displays of emotions or pyrotechnical displays of language. He is a teller of stories you can listen to as if you were sitting around in the living room, watching a game on the tube, and shooting the shit. That’s what a good friend, a good poet does; he takes you home and tell you all the good stuff.

---

Ken Poyner, Science Is Not Enough, Barking Moose Press, 2025, 152 pages, $13 (a kindle edition is available as well on Amazon).

Ken calls this collection of futuristic poems, speculative poetry, which is shorthand for poetry rooted deeply in the tradition of science fiction.  What separates Poyner’s poems from most of the science fiction genre, which I confess I have not read much of in recent years, is two characteristics: 1) Poyner is not wedded to the jargon that characterized much of the genre’s poetry. Personally, I find the “cliches” of the genre offensive to the ear. I argued at some length with the late Bruce Boston, a prolific practitioner of the genre, that the language you need to use for your readers feels like dumbing down your work, kills the poetic depth of the individual piece to satisfy the expectations of the reader. Bruce adamantly disagreed claiming the language is what enhances the poems. Maybe we were talking about two different things. I don’t know and I can’t clarify this point as, regrettably, Bruce passed away last year. Whatever, Bruce did make one claim I can’t refute: sci fi poetry pays and literary poetry generally doesn’t. So there. 2) Poyner’s poems are funny.  I mean actually tongue in cheek, laugh out loud at times, and always amusing. Sure, there are robots and fantastical futuristic themes and settings, but these are extrapolated in such a way they are farcical, outrageous, and good fun. Ken told me that readers have written him to say that they don’t like poetry but they really like his. I can see why. Robot Love, Robot Pornography, Robots recounting Human History. I can honestly say, we don’t come off well in these tales.   Poetry haters, listen up, this is the book for you. I assure you; poetry lovers can dig it too.

Benjamin Goluboff, Moe Asch: A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems, Kelsay Press, www/kelsaybooks.com, Available on Amazon, 2025, 114 pages, $23.

Goluboff has made a poetic career out of immortalizing historical figures with speculative lives in verse. His previous collections I have examined include Ho Che Minh and a host of musicians and artists in a collaborative sequence with poet Mark Leubbers.  Moe Asch, for the previously initiated such as myself, was a record producer who created a vast archive of world music and collected all the major artists of the folk revival on the seminal label Folkways which is now housed in the Smithsonian.  As befitting a son of a radical writer, Sholem Asch, Moe was an irascible, inimitable personality, and seemed to have been everywhere, known everyone, and chronicled the best and the brightest musicians of his age. Goluboff’s portrait brings Moe alive in a way that makes him feel vibrant and present as only the best writing can do.

Following Moe in the collection, there is a brief, but particularly vivid, series of poems referencing the portrait artist G.P.A. Healy.  You may not know the man’s name, but you have seen some of his portraits: John James Audobon, Andrew Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Aloctt among others.  If you haven’t seen them, you should.

Rounding out the collection is Chicagoland, Arts, Letters, Other a love story for the highways and byways of America’s “second city.” Reading these often jazzy, sometimes gritty poems, brought to mind Nelson Algren’s lyrical poem, Chicago, City on the Make, celebrating the city a few decades prior to the Chicago Goluboff is celebrating. The eras may have changed, the faces and people too, but the feeling, the personalities, remains the same: vibrant, multifaced, and uniquely American.  Of particular interest to me were “Bike Nocturne”, Guerilla Gardening,” “Scene from the Pandemic,” Cultural Clash at the Sausage Factory,” Googling the Dead,” and “President Donald J. Trump at the Western Wall, Jerusalem 2017.”

Kevin Ridgeway, Death of the Coppertone Girl, Luchador Press. Available on Amazon, 2025, 94 pages, $13.

What distinguishes Kevin Ridgeway from life’s benighted losers is that he has been battered, abused, knocked down, kicked around, and come out on the other side of the heartbreak and confusion a stronger man than most. He didn’t give up when he completely broken down, spent months in an asylum, and slowly worked his way back to a sober, reflective, productive life.  The result is this collection of narrative poems that details, and I do mean details, many of the tribulations of his life that would have (and often has) broken lesser men. His dad is in prison, basically for life, following his last armed robbery conviction. His beloved mother died too young. His ill-advised early marriage ended in disaster, breakdowns followed, and so did the poems.  I have been following Kevin’s progress for years and I can honestly say this is his strongest collection by far.  His poetry was raw and unfinished as he tried to emerge from the breakdowns, but he persevered and there is not one loser in this collection.

Entertainment From the Dead

The people on my television
in sitcom reruns from the 1960’s
are high-definition technicolor corpses,
the canned laughter a false joy
of dead people, the gags unfunny
and the plots cliched in teleplays
written by overpressured hacks.
I used to watch these shows
growing up, and dreamed one
day I’d be on one but now
I’m relieved not to be preserved
like an artifact to be scrutinized
by lazy couch potatoes,
imprisoned by syndication,
a ghost trapped in character.

---

William Teets, Babylon Redux, Cajun Mutt Press, contact cajunmuttpress@gmail.com. Available on Amazon, 2025, 93 pages, $12.99.

As I read these poems, I had the eerie sensation of evoked lyrics from sixties folk singers and rock groups.  I heard echoes of Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat,(“The music on Clinton Street/all through the evening), Bob Dylan’s, Highway 61 Revisited, (God said to Abraham kill me a son/Where do you want this killin’ done?/Down on high way 61) and Desolation Row (They're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown) but most of all it felt like cuts from The Doors, Weird Signs Inside the Goldmine. None of this a bad thing. In fact, Teets’s poetry feels as if he were a modern outlaw from an Old Testament Waste Land. The Waste Land is where we live now, have been living in for decades, and will be living in for a long time to come. I have no doubt that we will feel the wrath of the lord and even the righteous, if there are any of that breed left, will perish too.

There are no innocents in Babylon. About the only person who might qualify is a young girl with a sympathetic eye the poet meets in a liquor store. Most of the women, even those imbued with a retrospective sense of nostalgia of young love, are tinged with the soot of Babylon’s factories of war. Why else would they be sharing their first kiss outside of Jack the Ripper’s pub?  The lost loves are all one form of Lady Lazarus escapees from a Plath poem and anyone with any sense is looking for a way out of Tombstone. One gathers Dodge is ancient history and there is no point trying to escape from some place that no longer exists. Tombstone is everywhere.

And everywhere the poet looks, he sees fallen angels, hears choruses of the damned, encounters milk crate preachers evoking hellfire on the sinners who expect a doomsday at the hands of a savage god.  It is, indeed, Desolation Row. When last seen the Virgin Mary was leaving town on neon rollerblades.

The final section feels like Armageddon Now!  If there is hope anywhere near here it has been relocated to Hell and this is what Hell looks like now.

(from) Order of Operations

Homework heavy in her bookbag, empty stomach heavier. 9x12+3
doesn’t solve the past due school cafeteria bill. There is no order of
operations for a missed breakfast, missed lunch, bare cupboard at
home. She sits at the small folding table kitchen table and dreams
about Three Musketeers. The faucet drips. She doesn’t want to be
president someday, she wants something to eat.

Also recently received and will be reading in near future,

William Teets, After the Fall, Cajun Mutt Press, contact cajunmuttpress@gmail.com, also available on Amazon, 2023, 115 pages, $12.99.

A Novel: Reverend Went Walking, Outskirts Press, available on Amazon, 2016, 378 pages, $7.99.

A small press magazine, Night Owl Narrative Issue No. 6, Nov 2025, cajunmuttpress@gmail.com, available of Amazon, 90 pages poetry, prose and a generous selection of illustrations generally in color, $19.99.

---

William Taylor Jr., The People Are Like Wolves to Me, Roadside Press, roadsidefam.com distributed by Magical Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2025, 85 pages, $16.

If his poetry is to be taken literally, and there is no reason not to take him at his word, Taylor is a melancholy man. He prefers his own company to that of mass gatherings. Taylor feels a kindship with a few old drunks in a dive bar who are lost in the last days of their drinking themselves to death than he is in other public places where people, or worse, tourists, gather to gawk at the locals in their natural habitat. In a way these poems feel like a Jack Lodonesque, or Orwellian Down and Out descriptive testimony of life in the tenderloin district of San Francisco. Taylor isn’t abjectly poor, as are the people in London and Orwell’s books, but there is a boat load of loneliness and solitude for people failing to make human connections. There is also a sense of the absurd, a kind of quiet wry humor in Taylor’s observations. A recurring image is that of the “famous poet” whose self-assurance and blind allegiance to the wonderfulness of himself, only partially obscures the facile personality of someone whose ego is greater than his accomplishments. We don’t know exactly who this famous poet is but we know exactly what he is, a phony, the worst kind of phony, and he could be anyone. 

Another recurring personality is the beautiful blonde bartender who feels vacuous in a way that only a woman who is as beautiful as she is, and knows it, can be. She is still young enough to have a heart and a curious mind, but ultimately, feels as if she is falling victim to her beauty and isn’t motivated to do anything about it. It’s so much easier to go with the flow than become a fully developed person. 

An encounter with a woman causes hm to re-evaluate his opinion of Janis Joplin and he finds, despite himself, a certain kinship he previously paid no attention to. It isn’t life changing but it is amusing. Ultimately Taylor is not a depressive nor are his poems depressing. There is a thin red line between depression and loneliness/sadness and Taylor treads it carefully with a keen eye.  There are broken hearts and lost loves, major disappointments along the way, but you don’t have to let your setbacks define or break you. Taylor certainly does not. The most emblematic poem for me in The People Are Like Wolves to Me is In Search of It. Having already established that the human condition appears to be all about people perceiving others having what they are looking for the sum up his feelings of life,

The people have failed me,
the government has failed me
I have failed myself.

All of which is commonplace,

but I’ve grown bitter with hope
forever tricking me
into mucking through it all
just to reach the next rotten thing.

Yet here I am in search of it
(from In Search of It)

Taylor has decided to stick around because he loves the sound of the rain, the feeling the warmth of the sun. He calls himself the Walt Whitman of End Times and he might well be.

Virginia Aronson, Collateral Damage: literary biographies, Clare Songbirds Publishing House, www.claresongbirdpub.com, 2025, 120 pages, $17.99.

What is it about anthems for the doomed that is endlessly fascinating?  Not the doomed youth, necessarily, as Wilfred Owen wrote about so eloquently from the trenches of WWI, as a doomed youth himself, but Any person clearly doomed from the beginning of their relationship with art and life. Virginia Aronson continues her series of poems about writers. This time around she focuses on female poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop and male poets like poet Ted Hughes. Hughes was dangerous to know and impossible to resist.  Often knowing, or living with a writer like Hughes, is a death sentence, hence the title: collateral damage

T.S. Eliot had his first wife, deemed a depressive, and had her locked up in an asylum so he would be free to seek other companionship. She may well have been gloomy or moody but that shouldn’t be grounds for commitment. Not content with ruining one woman’s life, he spurns a long-time correspondent who had a reasonable expectation of being the new Mrs. Eliot, for a much younger woman who took over his life and career.   The quality of his later poetic work, when compared with the earlier work, can be endlessly debated, largely depending upon how you feel about Four Quartets versus The Waste Land. I guess the new wife made him happy. Lucky him.

Two of Hughes’s wives/lovers committed suicide because of his philandering (once is bad luck, twice is a bad habit seems applicable here.) One could argue about the quality of the pre and post Plath poetic output and her influence on his work.  Neither one of these Eliot nor Hughes, despite some genius level work, are people who to be admired.

And then there was the granddaddy of crazy guys who ruined the lives of female companions, all writers, Robert Lowell. You could argue, at least he had an excuse for a lifetime of bad behavior: a pronounced bipolar affliction in a time where there was no medical treatment for his manic episodes. Excuses or not, ask Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick and Caroline Blackwood what it was like living with him and what being the focus of his that attention produced personally and poetically. Some of his later work is right there with Philip Roth’s revenge novel about his ex, Claire Bloom, one of the moist disgusting narratives in American literature. Do not read the Lowell’s Dolphin unless you like vicious, hate poetry masquerading as art) At least, Elizabeth got the apartment in NYC, the summer house, custody of their child and a nice financial settlement but at what cost?  Lowell and the acerbic, alcoholic Caroline Blackwood probably deserved each other.

As did Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. The Thomas section centers as much upon the feckless, immature, drunken behavior of Caitlin as it does on the wanton, eternal child, Dylan. He left a small but vital poetic legacy with at least a half dozen poems plus A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Under Milkwood which will endure as long as there is such a thing as English Literature.

Anne Sexton offed herself in a garage dressed in a party dress with a shaker full of Gin to accompany herself into the next world. She breathed her last in her garage with the engine running and drifted off as the carbon monoxide filled her car. I guess that’s one way to write a sequel to her almost unreadable last book, The Awful Rowing to God.  Still her earlier work is visceral, affecting, brilliant and, looking back, how else could she have ended her career?

Edna “Vincent” Millay burned the proverbial candle at both ends, literally.  Bishop couldn’t escape her propensity for tragic love affairs and alcohol, Leroi Jones became Amiri Baraka substituting hate for art and Bukowski pursued his art and his dissipation with equal vigor until he met his match, Lady Death, losing a bout with the heaviest of all heavy weights. Reading his last several Buk thousand poems, mostly published posthumously, is like reading a long depressive litany against dying. That poetry is wearing at best, despite the occasional gem, and is enough to drive you to the bottle to forget what you have just read in order to catch up to where he was when he was dying.  As someone who used to drink like a madman but does so no more, I don’t see how that is a productive legacy to leave behind. Still, there was no one like him and many have tried, but none have succeeded in duplicating what he did. 

A fascinating collection. Choose your favorite requiem say one by Berlioz or Beethoven, crank up the CD player and have at these. 

On a similar note:

Virginia Aronson, Whiskey Island: Literary Biographies, 2025 Cyberwit, www.cyberwit.net, 76 pages, $15.

Aronson returns with another effective series of narratives focusing on contemporary writers who took their drinking, whoring (with both sexes) and writing seriously. Most of them left bodies strewn alongside of whatever road they were traveling but all of them left behind a substantial literary legacy, some of which, like James Baldwin, remain relevant and, if anything, grow in stature as time goes by. 

Baldwin, only briefly, but vividly, portrayed, was a lonely, contemplative man who couldn’t find a place where he truly fit in. His peripatetic lifestyle took him from his native NYC to France, Turkey, and other foreign lands but none of them truly stuck.  If nothing else, Aronson’s portrait makes you want to look further into his work. Or to find some of his vivid video interviews that are readily available online.

John Cheever is best known for his short stories of suburban life always strived for upward mobility and while he achieved pinnacles of success, the accolades and matching financial rewards, came too late to forestall a great void inside he filled with alcohol. Tales of his time at Iowa with Ray Carver, opening up package stores, are legion and memorable but not in the same way his writing was. The stories were masterful, the novels much less so, in my humble opinion. And, at least one story, The Swimmer, was made into a terrific movie with Burt Lancaster in one of his finest late roles. Susan Cheever’s Home Before Dark remains one of the great memoirs of a fatally broken family. Aronson shows us a man in crisis never quite at home with who he was supposed to be.

Scott Fitzgerald can easily be summed up as few people can As Aronson does, “famous at twenty, forgotten at 30 dead at 44.” In between he wrote five novels, one of which is a fixture in the canon, well over 130 short stories, many of them written for money to support his wife in an asylum and pay for their daughter’s schooling. Many of those stories are not first rate but all are readable (yes, I read them all), because if nothing else, Fitzgerald was a terrific stylist.  His Crack Up memoir is unforgettable, detailing the downside of the roaring 20’s. After the laughter dies, the money dries up, and all the illusions are shattered, what’s left?  A date with Gatsby for a dip, face down, in the swimming pool, no doubt.

Dashiell Hammett did what few of the other writers mentioned in this collection did, he created a whole new genre of writing: hard-boiled detective novels featuring tough talking, idealistic detective wading through the cesspool of civilization to find a kind of pyrrhic justice in an intimate, terse style. It could be argued that The Maltese Falcon, is one of the most influential novels of the century, as was the unforgettable movie made from it. The dialogue is sparse, the nights are dark, the days shrouded in a kind of miasmic afterglow of corruption but through it all, the tubercular Hammett, a former Pinkerton man, was a living legend much as is his creation, Sam Spade, detective with a strong moral compass.

Hemingway was a victim of his self-styled legend.  Yes, he was there at the peak of the Lost Generation, wrote some amazing stories, covered world wars, and was wounded driving an ambulance. In recovery, he had a fateful doomed, love affair and wrote one great novel, The Sun Also Rises, and a series of novels after, decreasing, almost exponentially, in literary quality. A case could be made he became a parody of himself. The dialogue in For Whom the bell Tolls is so bad, so mannered, stylistically dreadful as to be laughable. His decline reached an apex in the infantile, Nobel Prize securing, The Old Man and the Sea. Due to excessive self-indulgence, his health deteriorated, his marriages until, late in life he realized the love of his life was Hadley, the wife he unceremoniously dumped for the alluring, wealthy, temptress Pauline, the second of his four wives. Or, at least, that’s what the posthumously released, A Movable Feast memoir would have us believe. Aronson shows us the man and the books; the more I learn about Papa the less I like him but that’s not Aronson’s fault.

The portrait I liked the most was of Ian Fleming. He not only created a legend but a franchise when he created James Bond. John F. Kennedy ‘s professed love of the character made Fleming and Bond a household name. The rest is history. And there is plenty of history associated with the life before Bond. He was the black sheep son of a wealthy family but he found a niche in the special services during the WWII and helped spearhead some of the more imaginative, daring and successful spy craft of the war. And yet, what do we know him for, “shaken not stirred?’ Those of us who are purists know, you never shake a martini, and it is always made with gin but what do I know? I’m not a legend. Aronson makes me want to order another round Of Mr. Fleming and maybe even reread some of those Bond books (the early ones, anyway)

What was true of Hemingway “the legend” could be said for Mailer who is vividly portrayed here. A victim of short man’s disease, Mailer conducted himself like a boorish, drunken tough guy to compensate for his lack for stature. Who knows if this diminutive physique was a factor in six marriages, an attempted murder (of sorts) of one of those wives, nine children and vast catalog of inferior writing that no one, more than himself, promoted as being the most important books of his time. It is my contention, he will be remembered for his journalism, despite often being guilty of the worst sort of self-congratulations (Armies of the Night anyone?)  but perceptive and of historical value nonetheless. His one great book, to my mind, is The Executioner’s Song, a non-fiction novel in the manner of In Cold Blood. It is elegiac, detailing the end of the myth of the old west in the life story of one man. Still, that one man was Gary Gilmore, a serial killer, whose only redeeming feature seems to be some semi-literate love letters to a feckless, illiterate young woman.

James Joyce is briefly profiled and what can you say about him? He was James Joyce, a total whack, the ultimate literary self-referential genius. Aronson cites Edna O’Brien’s brief life of Joyce is well worth reading as a follow up. 

All in all, this collection is a great introduction to some of the more fascinating authors of the previous century with new insights and anecdotes for long time fans of their writing.

---

Michele McDannold, Collected Poems 2005-2025, 2025 Roadside Press.  roadsidefam.com Distributed by magical jeep available on Amazon, 294 pages, $20.

As I began reading this substantial volume of hard hitting, direct to your blood stream poems, I could almost hear that country and western dude who used to yell, “Are you ready for some football!” in the background. After a while, I learned that mute is a wonderful invention, and watching football isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (that’s another story, for another place) but the idea was is here, “Are you ready for some smashmouth, in your face Action. “Well, what this book needs is someone to yell, “Are you ready for some Poetry!!” yelled as if you were at some spoken words festival with a full accompaniment of jazz men in the background, a chorus of soul sisters for voice enhancements and a huge spot light to focus intently on the reader. Ok, yes, I exaggerate, Michele doesn’t need the accompaniment as she does fine all by herself on the page or in front of a mic as we learn on page 2,

this poetry is not recommended
for the young or bright-eyed
not recommended
for those weak in the stomach
or head
this poetry is not recommended
for the high-brow
sissified
punk bitches
who would tun a phrase
just to make you feel stupid
poetry is not recommended (period)
if you want to bury your head in the sand
and pretend the world is dying under corruption
we have a voice
(from not recommended)

What this poetry is for is to tell it like it is, is writing from the heart, the body, the deepest parts of soul. It’s no bullshit poetry. We need more of that.

Austin Alexis, The Whirlpool Bath, Kelsay Books, www.kelsaybooks.com, also available on Amazon, 2025, 118 pages, $23.

I was never a gym rat though I loved basketball, so I’ve seen my share of locker rooms. If I ever have occasion to see or visit another, I will see locker rooms with a new set of eyes.  Austin Alexis doesn’t so much describe the atmosphere of a locker room as inhabit it. The scents, pungent smells, dampness of sweat and showers are palpable. The first section of this fascinating book is Sensual/Sexual. Alexis does not directly focus on overt sexual possibilities, those are implicit in the sheer physicality of the place, but makes you feel what it like to be in a locker room. Now. As you read. And locker rooms can be dangerous places such as when there is an unrestrained epidemic. The sheer madness of denying the reality of contagion, which happened as we all know, with predictable disastrous results. They are also the haunts of bullies who use states of nudity against frailer, insecure people though the usual tactics that bullies use but generally revealing their on inadequacies while belittling others. That said, if I never see another locker room fight, I won’t be sad; the results of the last one I saw were bloody and stupid as most fist fights are.

The second section is Private/Intimate and Alexis hones in on particular places with brilliant focus. Select titles reveal the kind of poems included here: Dementia Intrigue, My Father’s Room, Passed Away, The Dard Side, Homemaker at 10:15P.M. but it is the Whitney Houston poem that blew me away which concludes as follows,

Yes, I’m dead and I speak
from the place of the dead,
a location of adios bodies.
No bodyguard stopped my hands
from grabbing beckoning drugs.
No song sung by me or others
halted my decline down the tub’s incline.
I entered a setting lacking health,
minus birthdays, deprived of growth.
A place out of concert with life.

The third section is Historical/Societal and focuses on some familiar objects such as Van Gogh’s Wheatfield and some much less familiar places like the African Stonehenge. I was unaware of the African site and I thank Alexis for informing me of its existence. A good book is one where you learn something new as well as are treated to polished craft and inventive phrasing. Perhaps, most unnerving was his subway riders of the apocalypse, NYC commuters maskless in the underground during the pandemic.  The most overtly political poem is the George Floyd heinous murder at the hands of the police masked as law enforcement. Who knew this killing was only the beginning?

The final section is Philosophical/ Spiritual

His extorting the statue in Columbus Square to “if you see something/say something” is inspired but it is the ode to locked down New York City in “Public Health Emergency” that is most special. The language is spare, self-contained but the images are as intense as they are brief

(2)

Pandemic quiet, street by street
Times Square flashes
lavish loneliness of closed businesses,
offering people nothing to do.

May we never see the likes of this again but with the current director of Health and Human Sacrifices, I wouldn’t bet against it.

Robert Clifton, All These Things I Will Give to You, Rain Mountain Press, www.rainmoutainpress.com, 2025, 105 pages, $19.

Clifton is a no-nonsense poet who takes no prisoners. In this Chinese puzzle of a book, he tackles the subject of love and divorce, friendships and isolation, nature and man, actually the whole gamut of big subjects in an artful, deeply resonant way. Each poem is finely crafted like the cabinets he builds as a woodworker. They are honed, polished and refined to a lustrous sheen that can dazzle the reader and inspire multiple close readings. More than most collections, especially in the first two sections, the poems seem like highly integrated, individual units with a tenuous inter-connectivity to the larger themes and subjects. Each poem deserves to be admired individually, in depth, rather than generally as part of a collective. This approach is beyond the scope of a review for this publication. Reading his earlier collections as well, I determined, Clifton is an intense, deep-thinking poet whose work is not easily understood in a single sitting.  There is not a huge inventory of his work which make what is available, like a Jack Gilbert collection, more valuable for simply having existed at all.

Alexis Rhone Fancher, Sinkhole, macquniterly@gmail.com, for purchase contact alexisrhone  fancher.com, 2026, 46 pages, photos by the author included.

The sinkhole referred to in the title is the one left behind by the death of the author’s sister, Debra Lynn. Having read most of Alexis’ available work in books, I was a little surprised, before I began reading this gut-wrenching book, that she had chosen the pantoum form. A few lines into the opening poem, Terminal: My Sister’s Diagnosis trying to catch my breath, I totally understood the choice.  I finished the poem, closed the book and recovered enough to begin reading the poem again. It was like taking a few well-timed, perfectly placed body punches, ones the wear you down but don’t knock you out right away but eventually weaken your resources for the knockout punch that will be the inevitable knockout punch. 

She thinks she’s getting out of there alive.
But the cancer has spread into her lungs.
A malignant tumor strangles her spine.
The size of a grapefruit, her oncologist says

This cancer has spread to her bones.
She’s screaming in pain, they do nothing.
The size of a grapefruit, her oncologist says.
No narcotics. She might become addicted.

She’s screaming in pain, they do nothing.
My sister is dying in a 3rd rate hospital in Atlanta.
No narcotics. She might become addicted.
Neurologist confirms: Dementia. Gives her a month.

My sister is dying in a 3rd rate hospital in Atlanta.
A malignant tumor strangles her spine.
Neurologists confirms. Dementia. Gives her a month.
She thinks she’s getting out of there alive.
(quoted in full)

There is no better way to write this poem. Alexis wrote this book to help assuage her pain and to show that her sister’s life meant something. That she made a difference. Her death makes a difference too.

---

Brief Reviews

Gabriel Ricard, Kevin Ridgeway and James Duncan, We Have Waited Long Enough, Alpine Ghost Press, 2025, not pagination, approx. 90 pages, no price.

Apparently, poet Duncan and his poet cohort, bounced poems off each other including ones with the same title as the book. The result was this collection of like-minded narratives.  Duncan is the dreamiest of the three, Richard the rowdiest, and Ridgeway the grittiest.  It’s an interesting idea that produced mixed results.

normal, Lost and Found Keys on a Boogie Woogie Piano, Iniquity Pres/Vendetta Books, PO Box 253 Seaside Heights, NJ 08751, 2025, 320 pages, $15.

I wrote a blurb for the book as follows,

Spanning the second half of the twentieth century
to the present day, Normal’s poetry is a vibrant
voice defining the age. From his earliest poems
as an idealistic teenager for peace, to the mature
philosopher of man in harmony with nature,
Normal has sought to define how the human spirit
survives in times of social upheaval. Lost and Found
Keys of a Boogie Woogie Piano is a rollicking,
Bluesman journey of discovery from down and
out on both coasts to a life as nurse, husband, and
caregiver/poet. Normal is a true man for all seasons;
dance to his Boogie Woogie piano music of our times.

Dave Roskos poems, collages by Jen Dunfrod Roskos, Heaven’s Waiting Room Revisited,
Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, PO Bos 4008, Brick, NJ, 08732, 2026, 34 pages, no price listed.

Most of these poems originally appeared in a small, pamphlet chapbook by Between Shadows Press in 2021. Roskos has expanded the original written work detailing his job as a life skills specialist.  What is an LSS?  It’s a responsible adult who helps people, generally older, disabled, or nominally functional adults, deal with everyday issues like paying their bills, shopping, managing money, basically, how to get through a day on your own.  It’s a job that requires patience and understanding of what it is like to be deprived, down and out or institutionalized for one reason or another. Roskos has had to deal with all these things in his own life and now that he is straight and drug free, he is eminently qualified for the work.

Addressing the gaps in his resume, in the first poem, is indictive of the life Roskos has lived, “What were you doing during this two-year gap?” “Heroin.”  “What were you doing during this three-year gap?” “Crack” He was just the sort of guy they were looking for.  Roskos is a unique person, and this is unique collection that the masterful trippy, surreal collages by his wife, Jennifer Dunford Roskos, compliment the poems perfectly.

David Chorlton, Desert of Earthly Delights, Cholla Needles, available on Amazon, 2025,
48 pages, $12.

Readers of prolific poet David Cholrton will most likely be less familiar with his painting than they are with his visual imagistic poetry. This sumptuous, in color, representation of his desert renderings, combined with a poetic narrative, will be thrilled at the opportunity to view these abstract watercolors.  This reasonably priced small book is a must, two books for the price of one, really, easily one of a kind anyone who loves Art, in written word and on canvas, will love.

Mark Cox, Knowing, Press 53, www.Press53.com, 2024, 98 pages, $17.94, also available on Amazon.

Knowing is a wide-ranging collection of prose poems that addresses questions both personal and aesthetic.  Generally, these are effective, especially the personal ones, as you might expect from an accomplished poet who has an extensive, well regarded publishing career. One strange exception leapt out at me. In his poem When Calls the Heart, Cox refers to George Eastman, (founder of Kodak film, at one time the standards for the industry and also the man who gave us the Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., a museum for creative photography, film etc.) as George Kodak. He really needs to fix that.

Rose Mary Boehm, The Matter of Words (almost) found poems, Kelsay Books, www.kelsaybooks.com, also available on Amazon, 2025, 24 pages, $17.

Poets love words, that’s a given. Rose Mary has culled the language for some extreme examples of the wild, outlandish, unknown, and, ultimately, evocative words.  Each of the twenty-six unusual words inspire brief witty brief poems some of which are laugh out funny with the exception of the final, sober, poem of longing, Saudade, that closes out the collection. If you love words (and who doesn’t? you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t) you need to have this collection.  I’ll quote an example which seems altogether too appropriate for the times we live in,

Pandemonium

Wild uproar of evil spirits,
chaos, a stampede of primal beasts in flight,
Milton’s “High Capital, of Satan and his Peers”
built by the fallen angels, following a suggestion
whispered to them by no other than Mammon,
a prince of Hell and the demons of avarice.

---

From Carbonation Press, Spokane WA published by Lulu and available from Lulu.com:

Scott Lawerence with drawings and collages from Gregg Simpson, 2025, 138 pages, price unlisted.

Lawrence and Simpson are old friends and collaborators, literally, and there is a great deal of surrealistic fun and games afoot in this collection. If you are looking for sense, look elsewhere, but if you are looking for nonsense, this is the place for you. Surrealism is, after all the antithesis of sensible. The writings, collages, illustrations, are dreams within dreams evoking an artistic muse Jodorowski, filmmaker and novelists noted for his striking imagery and incoherence (in my view). There is a lot of wild and strange stuff happening here sort of like what you would get in the Jim Morrison Horse Latitudes.  If you can make sense out of Morrison’s surreality more power to you. When he sings it, there is a certain power but, on the page, it reads like disconnected tissues of something that might have been interesting but really isn’t. Still the energy in the song and in this book is real and contagious. These guys clearly know their craft and are having a lot of fun creating. There is a hell of a lot worse things they could be doing.

Dario Cvencek, PTSD Martini, available on Amazon 2025, 238 pages, $20.

As we are witnessing the unfolding of war on our streets, Cvencek, in brutal, uncompromising, strident language tells us what it was like on the streets of Bosnia where he was entering his teen years. “I was twelve years old. I learned a new word-sniper.” Words are his grenades and he isn’t kidding. If there is a more poignant important poem published in 2025 than “10 Things I Learned About When I was 10” I don’t know what was. It’s the stuff of atrocities, of murder, incomprehensible violence. His work is so visceral that when he slips into a Kafkaesque kind of sleepwalking through a nightmare voice it doesn’t feel unnatural or unreal, it feels normal. He has lived through the terror of war and recognizes it is happening here as well and let me tell you, it is personal. There is nothing more personal than physical violence.

Flavia Richa, Nature Talk, also available on Amazon, 2025, 143 pages, $15. Translated from the Portuguese by the author.

Poems in Nature Talk don’t feel translated, by which I mean the syntax, language and fluid nature of the poetry itself feels native to our language. The author taught for many years in ths country and she was an editor at Rattapallax, a well-regarded NYC arts magazine, so her familiarity with our language is extensive. Writing in her native Brazilian language is like a love affair rekindled with her country. And with her poet friends. The first section are all tribute poems to a variety of poets known to the author. Not being familiar with them doesn’t seem t hamper the poetry ais implicit in them even if we miss the inside jokes, in particular Jolo Cabral de Neto.  The focus of much of the rest of the collection is rooted in Nature, as in the landscape, places and country and urban.  Often the work falls in a gray area somewhere between surreality and dream though always with a vividness to them that makes foe engaging selections. City Windows are spare contemplative almost Zen like poems, while others are mirror images reflecting back on each other.  City Bridges concludes the collection with brief at times almost whimsical prose poems. This is a strong collection of variations on a theme closely related to her native land and the people she knows intimately.

Salvador Espiriu, translated from the Catalan by Andrew Kaufman and Antonio Cortijo Ocana, The Cemetery. The Hours, & Mrs. Death, Rain Mountain Press, www.rainmountainpress.com, 2026, 198 pages, $19.

I am always wary when translators claim that their neglected poet deserved the Nobel Prize for literature and has fallen into obscurity despite being revered in his homeland.  After closely reading this exquisitely translated and well footnoted collected, I agree that he should have been a serious contender for the award, especially when you think of all the writes who did win (and the more illustrious list of those who didn’t.)

Espriu lived through the most tumultuous period of the twentieth Century’s second great war years. Franco was in ascendance and the revolutionaries were being slaughtered. Outside of Hemingway, Orwell and William Herrick, I have read little of those years in the area. Hemingway’s blustery, overblown love story in a time of war, really a great story told as badly as any great story could be, in For Whom the Bell Tools, pales beside Homage to Catalonia.  Catalonia which tells a story of the civil war on the front lines where, journalist/soldier George Orwell was gravely wounded. Why the former won the Nobel, and the latter didn’t, probably has more to do with their press agent than the importance of their work. Herrick was a member of the Lincoln Brigade who lived to tell the tale in some ferocious, on the spot novels and one excellent memoir but has sadly fallen into neglect. Kaufman and Ocana provide historical notes, and helpful informative introduction with pertinent footnotes throughout the text to guide the reader.  

Espriu veils his political comments especially in The Cemetery in allusive ways letting the reader extrapolate why a seeming offhand comment like the poets are no longer bustling. He appears to have been a shy, inward person whose writing reveals a “dark horse” personality. Behind that serene, functionary person, lies literal uncharted depths. He is obsessed, with death. In fact, his country, in the time these books were being written, was a cemetery. I have pages of notes, and I would need pages upon pages to do full justice to this great poet. Anyone who love to read poetry in translation, who loves poetry needs to see this book.  Don’t take my work for it, buy this book and read it for yourself. 

Liz Robbins, Backlit, Rattle, www.rattle.com, 2025, 44 pages, $9.

Robbins inhabits the life, time, and daily schedule of a sex worker with a convincing, in-character voice. The sex worker’s life is, by definition, is tawdry, brutal, nasty, and dirty but Robbins unflinchingly climbs into the sleeping space with truckers, cheap hotel rooms with tricks and on the street soliciting johns.  Apparently, assuming the voice of down and out characters in her previous award-winning collections, Freaked and Play Button making Backlit and extension of her sympathetic poetic voice rather than an outlier. Backlit is a worthy addition to the ongoing collection of Rattle Poetry Chapbook Contest Winners which guarantees Robbins the wide audience she deserves.

Tim Suermondy, A Day in the Republic, Dos Madres Press, www.dosmadres.com, also available on Amazon, 2025, 85 pages, $20.

It would be difficult to find a more amiable companion on the page than Tim Suermondt.  His poetry is genial, gracious, and filled with love for his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong. An excerpt from the title poem reveals the kind of man, the kind of poet, Tim is,

My wife and I walk the city,
miles and miles, territory

we could traverse blindfolded-
even the new establishments

seem familiar, what exactly
is new under the sun?  We make

it back to our front door, in time
to join the dusk as it turns to darkness-

the tiny park almost emptied out,
a police siren, but everyone has been good

George Wallace, Resurrection Kisses, Poetry Playhouse Publications, www.poetryplayhouse.com, 2025, 130 pages, $20.

Love, in all its forms, manifestations, magical incantations and disappointments make George Wallace’s poetic world go around.  At once sensual and sensuous, musical and lyrical this is a strong collection which are, essentially, variations on the theme of love.

When I can’t remember
where I came from, I ask
my dear old mother,
standing at the front door
on the Fourth of July in Maine,
in her housecoat and slippers,
holding a snow shovel in one hand,
and half a bottle of firecracker beer in the other.
Spider holes, she says. Water pails
You come from shotgun shells and footprints in the snow.
Beautiful strangers, wearing black.

While the quoted in full poem above is an outlier to the primary theme, it does shows that Wallace can create an unforgettable image, and an origin story unlike most others. You have to love it.

Kimberly Ann Priest, tether & lung, Texas Review Press, www.texasreviewpress.org, 2025, 82 pages, $21.95.

How do you feel when you find out that the man you married, the father of your children, the person with whom you have been sharing your life with, is a closeted gay man? All these intimate moments, shared confidences, hopes, and dreams, become something different than you originally thought they were.  Sublimated desires become tensions, the children and the animals on the farm become love objects, while the parents grow more distant from each other.  She has needs as a woman and he has needs as a man but they no longer match.  The relationship is no longer viable and it is slow painful dissolve but not one without love for what they once shared and the children the union produced. 

Aleathia Drehmer, Quiet Underpinnings, Roadhouse Press,  roadsidefam.com, magical jeep distributors, also available on Amazon, 2026, 100 pages, $17.

Drehmer’s latest collection observes the natural process of life, he natural order, aging into middle age in a world out of balance.  Difficult problems of illness, relationships, parenting, societal ills are part of jigsaw puzzle of life. The poet finds solace in nature, close friendships and her family, yet there is as much sadness as there is beauty.

The sky is gray this morning
as I think of this, and the edges
of my mind grabs hold
of another mass shooting,
more children died for nothing
all of them were silkworms
waiting to be butterflies.
(from the title poem)

Scott C. Holstad, Surviving Immortality Again, Alien Buddha, available on Amazon, 2025, 132 pages, $12.99.

Scott Holstad is, literally, a survivor of the underground poetry scene that sprang up in the 50’s, achieved widespread attention through the mimeo generation and print publications of mostly short run small magazines, all the way to the current internet culture. Arriving on the scene during the Lifshin era and still hanging on today, Holstad was everywhere in mags of 80’s and 90’s vintage and then disappeared.  The grim reaper didn’t get him but illness, physical and mental, did. He moved something like 40 times and it was a struggle to stay alive much less write anything, but he’s back now with this collection. In a very real sense, this book is a life history: “is about one person who has survived so many deaths, diseases, wrecks, suicide attempts, shootings, stabbings, overdoses, actual literal death, others around him going down, absurdities and impossibilities…” (from the Introduction). 

This is visceral stuff, harsh and down in the muck, and in the dive bars with the badass four horsemen of the apocalypse boys.  It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There are lyrical moments, dark humor, love won and lost. The book is a testimony to surviving against all the odds and it is kind of a miracle to exist at all. Scott hasn’t been, isn’t well now, but he’s hanging on. We came up through the small press trenches at the same time. Hang tough, brother. There aren’t many of us left.

Two more from small press veterans

Jeffrey A.Z. Zabel, When I’m Dead and Feeling Blue, Androgyne Books, 2026, 78 pages, $15, available on Amazon.

Despite the author stating he has had a lifelong battle with depression and the darkness of the subject matter there is an exuberance to these selected poems from along publishing history in the littles that stretches back into the 70’s.  My immediate sensation of reading these was a deep connection to the Romantic poets; imitations of immortality or should I say mortality?  The subjects may be death and dying but the words full of the stuff of life, that the music of this life full of suffering and woe has a musical accompaniment that can only be described by the Blues. Zable is a musician, a percussionist, who regularly plays out. We go into to the void, but we do so with brio. We may be depressed at heart but the life force, spirit, like a Beckett character, persists, because this is what the sprit does. Zable’s influences as a poet are the moderns but his roots extend deeper than the bar stool poets.

Conga

Black hands on drum,
spider’s dance
hungry for white
inviting skin of sound
Messages, feeding
the rainbow princesses
in ovular rooms.

Blue sweat of Africa
rinsed from voices
of the soil
into the air,

in a clear
but trembling lament

Linda Lerner, And Wales by Accident (poetry and prose), Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, available on Amazon, 2026, 81 pages.

I had to laugh when I found out in section five what the title of the book meant. On our first two trips to England my wife drove (back in 80’s and 90’s never again!) and found the signage deliberately confounding. On a coast road we could look up the cliffs and see Dover Castle but we couldn’t get there from the road. Or so it seemed the first four times we went around a traffic circle (then new to us) and chose the wrong route. Who knew there were so many bad choices? On try number five we ascended the cliff, on a beautiful day, and could barely get a look around, as the queen was scheduled for an event and they were setting up for the ceremony. Another day we headed toward Plymouth, also on the coast, following what we thoguht were the proper signage south and but were actually headed North in the general direction of Chawton, Jane Austen’s abode. It wasn’t the O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey ships we hoped to see, but it was Jane’s place, and we had a very nice tea where the proprietress, by chance a former American, assured us that the signage was deliberate from WWII to confuse the German’s and they never changed it back. How very British. I didn’t get a good poem out of Dover though I would at Jane’s on a later trip, but we did get a photo of the black clouds crossing the channel from France that followed us all around the countryside and would be the cover of my book, Our Lady of the Shipwrecks.

In the five sections of Linda’s book, she explores ordinary life, survival, history, family history deeply rooted in the Old World where oppression fascism and The Depression were everyday experiences. There is a lot of death and dying but that’s part of life. The older you become the more death you know. Still there is beauty, in life, Art to see and make, connections to discover all of which makes moving on, makes survival possible. Deep connections are made and severed, but the words remain.

Linda has been one of my favorite poets for decades, she knows what the writing process is all about so when she begins what seems like an ordinary day at a summer Tai Chi practice poem you should prepare yourself for something momentous.  Even prepared for something out of     the ordinary this poem grabs you by the throat and won’t let go,

 I tried to concentrate
on the instructors leading us through
the familiar steps, ignore the increasing heat

hoe fast it spread, no warning, there should have
been a warning, what a red ball a dog chased

set off in my head, the short time it took
to go through the tai chi practice three times,
a whole town I’d never visited
burned to the ground

In August 1945. Twice. Without warning, 78 years before this poem.

She continues, in the next poem, a whole town disappears just like that…There is no such thing as an ordinary day in the age of the atomic bomb. It could all be over like this. There is no such thing as an ordinary Linda Lerner poem either.

Brian Shovelton, Sun Sets Over Waltham, Legitimate Business Press, jenniferdunfordri@yahoo.com, available from Amazon, 2026, 104 pages, $10.

If Shovelton’s first title from Legitimate Business Press was a primal scream of a man dealing with his addictions, the demons of abuse, The Sun Sets Over Waltham is what happens after the demons have been exorcised.  Essentially, Shovelton is asking the essential question of: who am I in the time after being among the living dead.  Addiction defines who you are for as long as you are shackled to your need, afterwards you are a different person entirely. Finding out who that person is, defining who he can be and what life will look like in this “after” life is a different kind of struggle but one that is equally as difficult and as important as getting straight.  Not being able to cope with the new you, the rush of the hit, the thrill of the high are all gone and there is only what? Life. And life is a bitch which is probably why you got hooked in the first place. A lot of addicts don’t make it through the process of becoming the new you. It is hard work, don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. You need determination, a strong will and, hopefully, a loving support network to make it. The Sun Sets Over Waltham, despite its loud, almost feverish tone of his struggle, is, a hopeful book. The reader sense this is a guy who is going to make it. You want him to make it and be a better, drug and alcohol-free person.  I Know I do.

Dan Sicoli, Slag Alley, 2026, 42 pages available through the following link https://www.ethelzine.com/shop/slag-alley-by-dan-sicoli.

Where you grow up makes a lasting impression regardless of where it was that happened and who you became later. Sicoli’s poems in Slag Alley delve into the back alleys, the deep experiences that make excellent poetry from the mundane life. He reflects back to an age when an older brother or a wild man from the neighborhood can attain a kind of mythic aura through his exploits by pushing the envelope as far as it can go. Upon reflection these awe-inspiring deeds are more recklessly suicidal than they are heroic. But at the time, well at the time they were just beyond what happens every day, fifty years later they still seem magical. The poem John Herkimer’s bother is a vivid example,

With his high school dropout blue jean demeanor
john herkimer’s brother was a dowry hunter
and a close caller
a midnight oil tanker man
who sold us prescriptions of promise
of fabled teenage americana
with the conviction of a slop house tattoo artists

somewhere between gin mill spirits
grease gun drippings
and wispy smokes in the back of a borrowed van
he turned morning lies into evening desire
on a tiny earth that coveted our dreams

The longest poem in the collection, “jack mckumbry’s evolving soul” is another larger-than-life character from the poet’s youth. His story is not fantastic from afar but if it is someone you know, well it feels like one of those stories that has to be told, one of the reasons why we tell stories in the first place. 

Elsewhere in this tightly constructed, hand sewn chapbook, a work of art in itself, there are first sexual fumbling in back seats of cars, in a closet make out sections, drunken exploits with free spirited women too young to know any better, all part of the coming of age process.  In the end memories of place are what drives this chapbook; without our memories our lives are nothing. These are all memories worth keeping.

Rena J Mosteirin, Disaster Tourism, Boa Editions Ltd.  www.boaeditions.com 2025, 138 pages, $19.

Disaster Tourism is a high energy, intense, lyrical poems that are not afraid to look at the gory accidents along the highway. There are disaster tourists, and they are a sick lot, drawn to other people’s suffering, pain and misfortune like energy vampires sucking the life force out of the unfortunate.  Early sections are unrelenting while later ones are more personal but all are unflinchingly honest in their appraisal of the human condition in these fraught times. 

J.J. Campbell, to live your dreams, Whiskey City Press, available on Amazon, 2025, 91 pages, $15.

If you needed to sum up Campbell’s poetry in one word it would be: Raw. Campbell is always nakedly and aggressively visceral, cuts to the bone, always muscular and pointed. The women have been used hard and put away wet, as the phrase goes. The ones that say they like his poetry, that he is handsome or cute, are after something. Campbell is not cute or handsome he’s worn out, bitter and just this side of burned out.  There isn’t one pulled punch in the collection and he’s as hard on himself as he is on the women, many of whom he takes to bed regardless of their ulterior motives. Some fleece him, some don’t. They all move on leaving him hungover, used up, and ready to repeat the same endless path of anxiety, alcohol, and meaningless sex.  It’s not what you would call a life well lived but it is resolutely presented with not a single wasted or unnecessary word. If you like tough, honest uncompromising poetry this is a book for you.

Robert Cooperman, To Tell the Tale, Grateful Dead Association Studies, 2026, 28 pages, no price listed.

Cooperman is a resolute, unapologetic Dead Head. He may be 80 but as the t-short says, “I may be old but I saw all the great bands.” Including The Dead, many times, in legendary venues across the country.  To Tell the Tale is the sixth collection dedicated to the memory of the band. If nothing else, they were emblematic of an age, probably as much as any band that came out of the 60’s. Their work lives on in words and on cd’s. and it wouldn’t be outrageous to say: their music is timeless. Ironically, I literally finished reading Bob’s book to the news that founding member of The Dead, Bob Weir had passed away. 

The Grateful Dead,
one of the joys of my life:
their music, the Medieval folktale
redemption story 
from which they took their name,
the memories of a time
when all things seemed possible
despite the Asian jungle war,
when we were young and wild
to summon the spirits and songs
of the benevolent dead,
who would surely protect us all
and who we need now,
more than ever.
(from the “Jerry Garcia Sweatshirt”) 

Also, by Cooperman,

An Oar for Odysseus, Kelsay Books. www.kelsaybooks.com also available on Amazon, 2025, 132 pages, $23.

An Oar for Odysseus is the latest iteration of a multi-volume retelling of the life, times and myths of the great Greek warrior, Odysseus.  Cooperman creates an “after-life” on Ithaca that follows his return from the wars, his peregrinations, and the slaying of the suitors of his wife, Penelope. The many suitors were interested more in usurping has place as king of Ithaca than they were in her. And she was equally as dedicated to maintaining her virtue and reaming loyal to her husband as long as there was a possibility he might one day return and reclaim his rightful place as husband and king. You could easily call this wonderful, artful new volume: The Further Adventures of Odysseus. 

Odysseus is struggling with PTSD. In particular, he is not dealing well with the loss of his men and all the carnage he inflicted while fighting in the Trojan War especially the unnecessary killing of a defenseless boy. When we first encounter Odysseus, he is besotted, and has been for some time. Basically, he is a raving drunken fool, both unable to lead and be a husband to his long-suffering wife. Finally fed up with his father, their son, Telemachus declares himself king and ships Odysseus off in exile with two hired thugs who are not so much escorts but potential murderers.  Needless to say, Odysseus outsmarts the would-be killers and debarks on a remote island where he rescues an abused wife of a warrior and her son.  Will the wily one still be a formidable warrior? Can he find happiness with his new charges? Will they fend off would be state assassins?  Is there a happy ever after for Odysseus as the blind prophet Tiresias has foretold? Read this chapter of Cooperman’s epic and find out.

Jay Griswold, American Duende, Dos Madres, www.dosmadres.com, also available on Amazon, 2025, 88 pages, $20.

Every so often a book of poetry perfectly encapsulates the political realities of our times. I’m thinking of Carolyn Forche’s, The Country Between Us, for instance which as much as any book, fully captured the Latin American situation in the 80’s.  Now there is Jay Griswold’s American Duende. Despite a forty-year gap between these two books, Griswold shows how a book of poetry can be both timeless and capture historic events, the forces and the particulars of an embattled society. History may be a record of the past but its effect is ongoing.

There has been an argument advanced that writing political poetry is polemical, by definition, and ephemeral, as subject matter, being wedded to a particular time and place. What that argument fails to note is the focus of the poems in question; when you write about the human condition, about people in conflict; what is the difference between men and women affected by war in Vietnam than men and women affected by war in Homer?  The Vietnam conflict is the subject of more than one poem but a title like “In Memory of the Citizens of Colorado Killed in the Vietnam War,” give you a strong sense of the focus. “The Tunnel Rat” is not so much about men who crawled into the tunnels of Vietnam, probably the dirtiest, most dangerous, most traumatized duty in the conflict, but is as much about the rodents burrowing into the food supplies as it is about a soldier burrowing beneath the earth in search of the enemy.

Bob Dylan once vehemently asserted that he never wrote a topical poem in his life. At first, I thought that’s just Bob being Bob. I thought: what about “Blowin’ in the Wind?” What about Masters of War?” What About Highway 61?” and then I thought about the specifics of the songs and he was right. They are not topical. “Blowin’ in the Wind” felt as if it was a folk song that had been with us for generations days after it was released.  “Masters of War” is now and for all time. Highway 61 has been repaved by new demagogues.  Griswold’s collection is all heart for people in distress, speaks for whole societies in distress. None of it is pretty and it shouldn’t be. Maybe we are all at a carnival at the end of the world as the concluding poem asserts.

Milenko “Miles” Budimir, Nowhere to Go but Everywhere: Travel Poems, Roadside Press,  roadsidefam.com, available from Magical Jeep Distribution, also on Amazon, 2026, 56 pages, $16.

These post card sized poems in an appropriately small format pocket-sized book, convey the joys of “being there.” With so many places in the world to see, so many people to meet, taking to the road is one poet’s answer to the daily routines of life. An immigrant himself from what used to be Yugoslavia, Budimir has a deft eye, a sharp wit, and a poet’s soul all of which are essential to the true traveler in today’s troubled world.

Dennis Hinrichsen, dementia lyrics, Green Linden Pess, www.greenlindenpress.com. 2026, 92 pages, $18.

Hinrichsen has chosen an impossible task, a living elegy to two friends who are alive in body but whose mind are gone to dementia. The poems are mournful, fragmented but tightly constructed pieces; a series of poems that that stretches the boundaries of form to create a deeply engaged poetry.  The poet cherishes memories with his friends that they no longer share, emphasizing the grotesque, the horror of a death within life. Most chilling of all is Hinrichsen is reaching an age, he is in his 70’s, where he ponders is this me in another few years?  I hear you brother. I’m older than you are.

Nancy Kassell, The Resilience of Flowers, Dos Madres, www.dosmadres.com, 2026, 38 pages, $18.

This tight, brief collection the effect of war on women opens with an apt quote from Hernan Diaz: “History is just a fiction-a fiction with an army.” And the army is killing people as it always has, indiscriminately, heartlessly. This is impassioned, deep mediation, on man’s in- humanity to (wo)man. The Alice Neel poem should be on everyone’s best of the year list. Where have all the flowers gone?

Johnny Cordova, The Broken Buddha, Roadside Press,  roadsidefam.com, distributed by Magical Jeep, on Amazon and Bookshop, 2026, 98 pages, $17.

Johnny dropped out of the poetry scene completely for over seventeen years.  As the poems indicate, the time spent away from writing was not wasted. He is the kind of man who mediates daily engaging in a deep spiritual connection with the universe and his poems often reflect this connection.  He is also a man who undertakes an Asian pilgrimage that includes touring some of the sex shops in Thailand, engaging with ladyboys, witnessing more funeral rites, burials and burnings than you can imagine one could experience in a lifetime. In a sentence he is Johnny Cordova: spiritual seeker and man of the world. Truth is where you find it.

Often, in order to find beauty, you have to experience ugliness and depravity. To know the depths of one, is to better understand the meaning of the other. This collection is as rare as the man himself: compelling, probing, amusing, cultivating all the things that makes us human. The Buddha may be broken but he can be repaired, if not fully in body, completely in the mind.

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Prose

Nathan Graziano, A Better Loser, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep Distributors and available on Amazon, check out www.roadsidefam.com for ordering information, 168 pages, $18.

Graziano has been kicking around the small press scene for around a quarter of a century maintaining a presence with his relatable voice as a poet and a writer of fiction.  Each story in his latest collection has that feeling of, “Yeah, it could have happened that way. I could have done that too.” What 15-year-old boy hasn’t done something colossally stupid that he wishes he had never even thought of, much less participated in. I know I have. A Better Loser tells us that Graziano has as well.

You could extend that youthful, inchoate age into your thirties, or until you got married and more or less settled down with kids, whichever happens first. Graziano shows that he is not immune to adult immature acts, especially while under the influence of intoxicants, well beyond the time one turns chronologically adult.  I confess again, he’s not the only one.  The key to understanding the fraught process of becoming a “responsible” adult is in the title words, better loser. While he is by no means a perfect husband, teacher, father, he remains a good guy. He loves his kids, goes to work, supports his family, and restrains himself to transgressions that remain misdemeanors.  And he’s trying to be better. Who among us has never been nor has avoided being a loser at some point? It’s like with the glass house and the stones. Graziano is trying to be a better person and, from what I can see, succeeding. 

Translations

The Drunken Boat & Other Poems from the French of Arhtur Rimbaud, American Version by Eric Greinke, 2025, available from Amazon, 108 pages, $19.99 hard bound, 16.99 softbound.

First off, let me say, I do not read French nor, alas any other foreign language. I have a number of translations to look at so I will be forced, by necessity, to consider the texts, as opposed to comparing the original with the rendered into English version. That said, I have read, at least, six versions of The Drunken Boat and a like number of Illuminations and A Season in Hell including an earlier version of Greinke’s translation of The Drunken Boat. After reading his previous translation I read two other translations (I don’t have the books any more nor do I have Eric’s version which literally fell apart after repeated readings and comparisons.) I concluded that while Eric’s was easiest to read, the least “poetic” and probably the least accurate to the rhyme schemes and language of the original. Still, I was not ready to dismiss it as inappropriate.

After reading this 50th anniversary American edition and the introductory remarks, I can explain why.  No translator can render the original into the American/English and capture the language accurately, the rhymes accurately and attempting to do, feels forced. I have on hand a new translation recently published by The NYRB that attempts the impossible. The sense is there but reading it is like struggling through an amateur poet attempting to mimic a master. Greinke’s version, while raw on the artistic level, sings while the other plods.  I read all of Greinke’s book in one sitting marveling yet again at Rimbaud’s bold dissimulations, his toxic rage that would culminate in the in your face “later works” where he gives the academic world, the critics, the other poets, the world, the finger. “See, I’ve done it all, I’ve exposed your hypocrisies, I’ve conquered your forms and I’m done with it.” Implicit in this is a dare, “best me of you can.” No one could, and no one has, and, probably, no one ever will. He was in his early 20’s when he quit and just so over writing. 

In Eric’s opinion, the early poems are the best and The Drunken Boat is the best of those. Considered opinion tends to disagree with him. I’m not qualified to comment one way or the other, but I do know this; I enjoyed reading this edition (and I am on record as fulminating about modern translations of Greek tragedies being pretentious and silly which was my general opinion of modernizing speech in classic works in general) and I struggled through but a few of the traditional translator’s approach.

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Read but not reviewed and recommended

Bianca Stone, The Near and Distant World, Tin House, an imprint of www.zandoprjects.com,
2025, 100 pages, $18. The poet laureate of Vermont scores again with a brand-new collection of high-octane poems.

Nin Andrews, Son of a Bird, Etruscan Press, www.etruscanpress.org. 2025, 98 pages, $17.
These intense prose poems are a kind of memoir about a little girl whose “imaginary friend” was a black bird representing the angel of death. Dysfunctional family life, trauma and amazing poetry follows. 

Matthew Buckley Smith, The Soft Black Stars, Rattle, www.rattle.com 2026, 32 pages, $9.
The latest edition to the ongoing Rattle chapbook series, these are intensely personal poems referencing big subjects, a kind of middle age reassessment life love, lives cherished and lives lost in rhymed sequences. 

P.A. Jones and Ron Whitehead, Searching for the Ghost of Huner S. Thompson, Keeping the Flame Alive Press, available on Amazon, 2026, 77 pages, $15 paper, $25 hardback.
Two contemporary Beat poets on the road searching for the rebel with a cause’s spirit, one who knew him personally (Whitehead) and one who knew him through his work (Jones) as Jones says in his opening poem; “Most people remember the noise/ The whiskey/The shouting/The guns fired into the desert night/ This is the easy story/ Noise hides things.” There was a lot more to Thompson than noise.

Kiyoko Rediy, Black Holes and Their Feeding Habits, Terrapin Books, www.terrapinbooks.com, available from Amazon and Bookshop, 2025, 95 pages, $16.99. Poems to be blow away by. High level intensity, close cutting to the bone, personal and powerful. The unforgettable cover looks like it was lifted from the walls of the shack Eraserhead lived in.

Joe Cottonwood, buck naked is the opposite of hate, Shelia Na Gig Editions, www.shelianagigblog.com, 2025, 98 pages, $18. Available from Amazon and Bookshop. Joe impresses me as the kind of guy who’d be your best fest friend for life or a great guy to work with or for, as long as you play it straight, that is, don’t mess with him or sharpen your knives for his back because he’s not the kind of guy you don’t want mad at you.  The poetry is plain spoken and poignant, observant and very much of and in the world. 

Kerry Trautman, Things to Say When You Have Nothing to Say, Roadside Press,  roadsidefam.com, distributed by Magical Jeep Distributors and on Amazon, 2026, 100 pages, $17. Kelly has a lot to say being a mother of five children and an astute hard working-poet as this and previous Roadside releases show. Her work is not a diary of a madhouse wife or tales of battles with mother’s little helpers, but ones for wants and needs that transcend ordinary daily routines.  While she tends to the chores, her children, she is also up for a dirty long weekend and she never seems to be at a loss for something meaningful to say.

Callie Garnett, Shit Hike, The Song Cave, www.the-song-cave.com, 2026, 101 pages, $18.95. Roughly half way through this wild coaction, Callie, cites Bernadette Mayer whose influence would go a long way toward explaining her extremely unusual connections and willful perversity. I expect Callie would make an interesting companion on a long day hike in the ’Gunks.’

Miscellaneous

Dave Roskos issued a series of pamphlets by his late son Ayler Roskos which, collectively should be understood as highly political, impassioned, rants, as Disability Rights Poems. Ayler had Duchenne’s Muscular dystrophy for which there was, is no cure. Confined to a wheelchair for most of his life he saw first-hand how the world treats and mistreats people with disabilities. These zine format pamphlets, four in all plus a broadside should be read by everyone.  Disability Right Poems, Another Side of Ayler Roskos, Not My President and Dream of the Future reveal a spirit that would not be cowed, limited, or disregarded despite his disability.

Political Violence

They want to kill
the disabled with
one thousand cuts.
With cuts to healthcare,
supplemental income,
disability & education.
Any politician who
supports & votes for
Medicaid cuts is attacking
the disabled, condemning
them to slow death.

He protested, spoke out, and wrote right up until just before he passed away at the age of 28.  All hail Ayler!

Shortly after I wrote the above, Dave sent me a series of brief essays Ayler wrote not long before he died also published zine style: “Profit Motive Removal & Single-Payer Healthcare,” “How Poverty is Connected to War & Conflict” and “Living in Poverty” Address all inquiries about Ayler’s writing to Red Fuzzrat Media at the iniquity address listed below

Dave Roskos has recently moved. Address all inquiries to Dave Roskos, Iniquity Press, PO Box 4008, Brick, NJ 08723.

Also, just in from the pamphlet series,

W. D Ehrhart, The Uselessness of Words. There are two poems here including the title one which is a longer, veteran for peace, anti-war poem, and the title of book about to be released by Ehrhart. He is a former Marine sergeant, and easily, one of the best poets to come out of the Vietnam War. The second poem is rhymed which is the first I have seen of his in that mode, and I have read close to a dozen of his books. It won’t rank among my favorites. Still the poem, “Though the Uselessness of Words” makes a strong point, well.  

Ayler Roskos, Remember The Lowell Mill Girls and The Paterson Silk Strike

Bree and Olga Cabral, Occupied Country: Close the Detention Centers

Jim Cohn, Freedom Washes Her Feet in the Blood of the Wicked

Anthony George, War Current equates My Lai with current genocidal wars

Jimmy Fasulo, No Closer to Heaven mistakes Portlock for Porlock, In Xanadu, and elsewhere

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Magazines, Anthologies and whatever else fits

Michele Mcdannold ed., Roadside Assistance: A Roadside Press Reader,
 roadsidefam.com, available on Amazon, 2026, 198 pages, $20, www.magicaljeep.com/.../SO7LETPOXJR5T4LEQK36FBRE

This weighty collection is not a best of the press’s books so much as a selection of the work of 47 poets and writers of fiction all of whom had a book printed by the press from 2022 to 2025. Rather than run a Go Fund Me for the press, co-editor Dan Denton helped Michelle collect writing to produce this volume so that everyone is represented and the press is benefited.  I may be prejudiced, as I have published several books with the press, but I think there is a wealth of kickass work here that should appeal to just about any non-academic reader. 

Dave Newman, Lori Jakiela, William Taylor, Scot Young, Dan Denton, Westly Heine, Jennifer Juneau, Belinda Subraman, Dan Provost, Francine Witte, Nathan Graziaono, editor McDannold and Denton plus many more.

Lorette C. Luzajic ed, A Pot of Basil: ekphrases on love and loss, Ekphrastic Editions, 2026, ww.ekphrastic.net, available on Amazon, 137 pages, $14.

Editor Luzajic is an accomplished Canadian poet and artist who has been running an ekphrastic journal for many years now and has branched out into workshops for prose and poetry.  The workshops often involve intensive, thematic art centered writing courses ,of various durations. There is a fee involved for the workshops, but from what I’ve seen they are productive. A Pot of Basil represents some of the work from poetry and fiction workshops series. Each author chooses work to respond to and the editor has selected some of the better pieces for inclusion in this anthology.

The selections of what to respond to range from the familiar (Hopper, Van Gogh) to much less familiar but as you might expect, with such a variety of chosen subjects, quite diverse. Most effective was editor Luzajic poetry and two killer pieces by Ann Matzke, literally based on casualty events, one a school shooting, and another on a child accidently killing another child with a parent’s pistol.  Lisa Molina’s Halloween Party reflects a child’s viewing of a riotous adult party finally understood decades later is another piece that demands to be read more than once. Beverly See’s mediation grief ponders that inexplicable, unavoidable emotion.

The 50 Volume 2 edited by J.T. Whitehead, Head Hunt Press, contact 8488 Mesic Ct, Indianapolis IN, 46278, 2026, 106 pages.

I have long contended that America doesn’t do farce. The reason is because American culture isn’t sophisticated enough to get social humor that isn’t slapstick, Keystone copish or pie in the face kind. As Dave Barry pointed out a ceremony for receiving the prestigious Mark Twain Award for Humor (and I paraphrase) “Here I am at the most esteemed literacy humor award established in the name of one of our greatest writers and all anyone wants to hear are fart jokes.” It got a laugh but I don’t think he was kidding.

Americans grossly misunderstand satire also. Obviously, that’s why they elect a farcical self-satirizing buffoon who doesn’t get how he looks acts, and speaks like a demented clown. It requires a certain amount of self-knowledge, critical thinking, and reasoning skills that people don’t seem to value much anymore. Thinking is the key word here. It’s hard work and boring. How else could Stephen Colbert get invited to a White House dinner during the Tangerine terror’s first regime, when Colbert was portraying a conservative talk show host on The Comedy Channel. The character was actually lampooning all things conservative. Eventually, after a long series of pointed jokes and parodying, they caught on and had him removed from the stage. (as I recall anyway. I don’t know if he got to eat his dinner or even if he got paid. The Tangerine Man doesn’t like to pay people for the work they do) Even the dumbest people can be made to understand how stupid they are if you persist long enough. Colbert persisted. Persists to this day while he has his platform as an endangered species: the thinking man’s comedian.  No wonder he got fired from his late-night talk show gig: he was good at his job.

And yet America has produced some of the greatest satirists of the last 150 years and Twain the greatest of all. Many apolitical columnists ascended the ranks through pointed humor. Hey Art Buchwald, I’m talking about you.  Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko you too. These were men of the people with a sword to cut the heads off the big-headed boobies in government in industry. Later, satirists were stand-up comedians like Lenny Bruce, before he imploded and killed himself, and Mort Saul, before he imploded and sold out, and a whole host (that word again) of late-night comedians who tell it like it is (Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Steward, Trevor Noah…)

But what of the poor poet?  No one mentions the great satirical verse of our times. Is it because no one reads poetry? It can’t be that simple, maybe it is just life happened while we were busy doing other things, as John Lennon said. We were distracted and that’s what the powers that be want us to be: entertained by mindless spectacle. Readers, take heed, there is hope. The 50 is here with a hundred pages of glorious satirical poetry.

Editor Whitehead has assembled and reprinted some cutting edge, laugh out loud politically crazy, socially unacceptable writing, and some damn meaningful fine poems. The six poets represented are Denise Duhamel, Paul Fericano, Edward Field, Ron Kortege, K Lipschutz and Gerald Locklin.  There are five categories of poems: people, pop, writers, gods and the end. There isn’t a loser in the batch.  The poems raise in length from a couple of lines to Fericano’s absolutely inspired twenty-page rewriting of Howl in terms of Lon Chaney Jr. (aka The Wolfman, Howl, get it, and The Mummy) and the “entertainment” industry. A close second in the most amazing fun poem I’ve read in years is Lipschutz’s, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Burrito. I have seen literally hundreds of thirteen ways rip offs but this is the only one that succeeds of capturing the tone, voice and spirit of the Stevens classic while being hilarious at the same time.

This is a collection that has arrived at absolutely the best times as we are now in the worst of times. Read these poems and weep.

Clutch edited by Robert M Zoschke, 2026, 202 pages, $25.

The current issue of Clutch, always a rich menage of past and present small press poets and great art and photography, has outdone itself.  There are literally dozens of full cover illustrations along with black and white photographs by Zoschke’s main man, T.K. Splake.  Beside art by Gene McCormick and Chad Horn there are location shots of birds, boats and bodies of water that are as good as anything you will see in commercial magazines, if not better, by the editor, and Splake.  I was especially delighted to see some never before published outside of handout chaps, by Albert Huffstickler, also Splake, Jen Dunford Roskos, Horn, Jeff Winke, Dean McLain and Walt McLaughlin among many others.  This issue is dedicated to the late Michael Madsen the quintessential bad guy of many a film. Less known than his unforgettable acting (anyone who has seen Reservoir Dogs with that sadistic turn to Roy Orbison will know what I mean) is that Madsen wrote poetry of the “tough guy” school. Zoschke reproduces an original letter from Madsen and some other artifacts of a man who will not be soon forgotten.

Chiron Review, Issue #149, Spring 2026, is the usual 165 pages of poetry and occasional prose and reviews, selected from among the best of the small press poets of today.  The magazine is a quarterly print journal with slick paper is such a rare beauty these days anyone who doesn’t kick in the sixty bucks a year for these four issues doesn’t know what they are missing.  Roughly 62 poets’ chip in with the center piece dedicated to ten terrific poems from long time contributor, Marge Piercey.  An interview with John Yarra by John Wisniewski recounts knowing the Beats especially Ginzberg, Burroughs and Corso is another outstanding feature.

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The last and by no means, the least T.K. Splake Biannual book review

T.K. Splake, The End of the World, angst press, contact the author at splake@chartermi.net for more purchasing information, 2026, 145 pages.

Splake’s farewell tour continues with a cover image that pretty much sums up the theme of the collection: a queen of clubs, a tarot card showing of The Fool card, a half pint of Jack Fire, which sounds as dangerous at it looks, and a glass ash tray with spent cigarettes and a fresh one ready to go plus a pack of Camel shorts.

graybeard poet’s freedom
without boundaries possessions or lovers
soul waiting to die on open road

Says it all.

T, K. Splake, for margaret and emory, angst press, contact the author for purchasing information at splake@chartermi.net, 50 pages, 2026.

Margaret and Emory are Splake’s parents and he celebrates them with a cover photo of mom with her boy Tommy and his dapper dad on the back.  This volume has rich details of the poet’s life and his artist quests summoning the spirits of The Beats he follows for guidance on his poetic journey. There are ghost and shadows, memories of partners past, and the endless battles with rat bastard time and the fickle muse. Most of the recent Splake volumes have been his signature short three-line poems but this one mixes longer forms with the short ones.

Tasting reality

after realizing almost all of life forgotten
so before dying important to seize the moment
have more sex chasing adventure eat garlic

 

            without dreams you are dead

driving through blizzard white out to new upper peninsula home
after ten years writing poetry before living over Omphale art gallery
spring visits to porcupine mountains learning new secrets from ghosts