While it's currently available for pre-order, the new poetry collection by John F. Buckley and Martin Ott, published on Brooklyn Arts Press, will soon enter the world for real, in both paper and electronic formats. We'd love it if you considered picking up a copy. Poets' Guide to America takes the reader on an imaginative tour of the fifty states (plus such territories as Puerto Rico and Guam), using both free verse and traditional forms. We're very pleased with this book, and think it will please many readers as well.

As our publisher puts it, "No book can sum up our penchant for Prime Time, or quench our queasy appetite for pettiness, joy, porn, atrocity, puppy love. No writing can readily distill with equanimity all our dysfunctions into a series of digressive lines, or install like cogwork every ounce of our humor & humility—our humanity—into other humans via text, though this book tries to with all its elliptical, phantasmagoric might. History is either the friction between fact & fable or the fight between the fabulous & factotums, Haves vs. Huguenots, most of us feeble actors couching our wealth of quasi-wisdom in the triple-stacked twin-mattresses of juvenilia & factoids & misinformation. Perhaps our nation, or this era of it, will be tabulated one day into a totality beginning with tube tops & ending in moral turpitude. Perhaps we’ll just be forgotten. But not if Poets’ Guide to America has anything to say about it. This book is what a stand-up comic might load into his rebel’s flintlock musket if comedy were a flintlock musket charged with desire & lit by distraction by way of incidental accidents. Here is our country united by divisions, false maps & post-Op scar, having failed to keep it locked in our collective quiet, a jaunty & beautiful rendering of life in the parallel universe we call home & keep calling home about."

September 16, 2012  :  Posted by John F. Buckley

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