Jan 26

Collected Poems 2005-2025 by Michele McDannold reviewed by Dan Denton

Collected Poems 2005 – 2025 by Michele McDannold: a sort of review
by Dan Denton

About halfway through Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems, I stopped and went back to the beginning. I’d noticed such a wide range of topics and issues confronted by her poetry that I wanted to start over and write them all down. Within the first two dozen poems I was beyond impressed, and it was here that I started to realize that Michele McDannold is the everywoman poet.

Here is a full list of topics I scribbled down while reading to the end: mental health, suicide, talk therapy, abortion, poverty, hunger, food banks, homelessness, domestic violence, child abuse, drug addiction, motherhood, housewives, toxic men, toxic relationships, sex work and sex workers, landlords and slum lords, racism, gender inequality, love, divorce, break ups, cheap motels, unpaid utility bills, work, working at jobs under the poverty line, ex-husbands, harsh holidays, dysfunctional families, lost highways, lost potential, lost hope, roadtrips, and there are poems about small town racism and the big city melting pot.

Collected Poems covers almost every hot-button topic in the news today, and touches upon most every marker of a life lived in poverty. It confronts the atrocities of the powerful and the injustices they thrive upon, and it does all this with no extra words, no fluff, and no bullshit.

McDannold writes with a realism that carves her poems down to the bone with a butcher knife that never goes dull. She doesn’t pull any cute tricks or use fancy words. Her poetry is in your face and it doesn’t care if you’re offended by it. One of the book’s early poems, “Not Recommended,” lets us know that right away:

“this poetry is not recommended
for the high-brow
sissified
punk bitches
who would turn a phrase
just to make you feel stupid”

Throughout the book McDannold writes about the harsh realities of life with an unwavering and honest pen that simplifies the complex. Here, in her poem, “the things we rely on”:

“the past doesn’t matter much
where nobody has a
future”

In her poem “cityscapes while sitting on a cold, cold stone”:

“not everyone has a dream beyond
a warm meal and a safe bed”

and perhaps my favorite, this heartbreaking example, in her poem “while thinking about all those suicidal adults and your own relative story: porch sessions #2: survey”:

“cps.

an acronym meaning
fucked
from the get-go”

These are poems that had to get tough, or die, so it’s only natural that they come from the places where survival is a learned skill, not a birthright. In this poem, “the packinghouse — second shift,” one of my favorites of Michele’s, she writes this, about working in the meat packing industry:

“do not think
of the dead,
but of babies,
men
the rent
heat…”

In this poem about an addicted friend, “not like the movies,” she writes:

“now and again, in a quiet, empty moment
i think about her unwearied commitment
to a slow and lonely death”

While surviving these experiences may have led to poems with a tough exterior, they’ve also brought hard earned lessons. In her poem, “you laugh at rumble bees,” McDannold writes this:

“every experience has its
pearl”

and here, in the poem, “doorbells, mornings and death or (if you are a cunt),” she shares this pearl:

“if you shovel the shit long enough
you might forget what was under there”

in her poem, “before the resurrection,” she shares:

“and I believe that

shutting doors
is better than jumping out of windows”

and in her poem, “west coast notebook entry #6: when you need to sit in a dark theater, crying by yourself, with others,” she offers:

“you notice that our last dollars
were maybe more important than all those other dollars”

Amidst all the hard times, sidewalk grit, rough sides of town, fuck yous, broken glass and plastic flowers, McDannold also takes moments to recall times and places that weren’t all death and danger, as she writes in “the choose your own adventure stories we tell ourselves”:

“all i ever
wanted to write
was a happy ending”

but somewhere along the way she figures out that:

“the “I’m ok —- your ok” is a dead hippie lie”

that comes from one of her most well-known poems, “nothing to lose (or freedom)”.

McDannold doesn’t sugarcoat any of the reality that many of us pretend isn’t there, but one of the things that I love the most about her poetry is the small, undying bits of hope that are sprinkled throughout.
She writes in her poem “something in the way”:

“to be
a lightning bug
smacked to the windshield
glowing bright
for one more
moment”

As I was putting my notes together for this review, I was looking for something to compare Michele McDannold’s work to and I immediately thought of Riot Grrrl, and it fits. Collected Poems is a combat boot-wearing, punk, feminist roar. It’s loud. It’s bold. It’s crass. It ain’t taking no shit, and it’s calling us all to join. McDannold writes near the end of the aforementioned “nothing to lose (or freedom)” :

“get the fuck
out
out of your house
and stick a fist up their ass for doing this”

Collected Poems 2005 – 2025 from Michele McDannold spits in the eyes of The Man and curb stomps the heart of every abuser. It’s a 20 year journal of her hand-to-hand combat with love, and a how-to-guide for keeping your inner spark alive through the worst storms life has to offer.

Collected Poems is out now from Roadside Press. Click this link to order your copy.

Jan 12

Roadside Press publisher Michele McDannold interviewed at Hobo Camp Review

Check out the latest Hobo Camp Review, marking 16 years in publishing! https://hobocampreview.blogspot.com/2026/01/hobo-camp-review-interview-with-michele.html

Roadside Press’s very own editor/publisher Michele McDannold is interviewed. It begins…

Hobo Camp Review Interview with Michele McDannold

A note from HCR Editor James Duncan: Of the many indie press editors I’ve worked with over the years, Michele McDannold has always stood out for her relentless enthusiasm for the poets she publishes, the unending encouragement and excitement, the effort to get them reviews and blurbs, to get their books and voices and faces on social media, to make a world with more and better and grittier and honest poetry. She’s an absolute tornado of awesome and I’m happy to share this Q&A with you. Seek her work, and she’ll tell you to seek the work of so many other cool poets. Do so!

_______________________________________________________________________

 

You’ve been involved with the indie small press world for a long while, and in recent years you started publishing poetry, fiction, and essays under Gutter Snob Books and Roadside Press (among others). What inspired you to begin these presses? Zygote in my Coffee/Tainted Coffee Press, Red Fez Publications, Punk Hostage Press… there’s a pretty long list of free-wheeling organizations that inspired me. The DIY Press. The Literary Underground. I’ve always had a healthy love of books. Combine that with all the talent I found in the small press, and I just had to wonder what I might be able to contribute as a publisher. Plus, all these little presses that promised to publish my chapbooks kept shutting down! It seemed like a good thing to obsess over. Little did I know, this would be a lifelong obsession.

READ THE REST OF THE Q&A at https://hobocampreview.blogspot.com/2026/01/hobo-camp-review-interview-with-michele.html

Dec 14

Richard Modiano reviews COLLECTED POEMS 2005-2025 by Michele McDannold

first published at The Literary Underground’s IN CONVERSATION

McDannold, Michele (2025). Collected Poems 2005-2025 (Poetry Collection) Roadside Press 279p. $20.00 (Paperback)

Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems 2005–2025 is a bruising, beautiful chronicle of two decades lived on the raw nerve of experience. The voice here is equal parts survivor, witness, and outlaw philosopher—one who has been scorched by the world’s indifference yet still refuses to turn away from its aching humanity.

From the early, hard-living urgency of pieces like “not recommended” and “monkey bars,” McDannold declares her allegiance to a poetics that bleeds and sweats rather than postures. “This poetry is not recommended for the high-brow sissified punk bitches,” she writes, and she means it. The poems reject the polite sanitization of language and experience in favor of a fiercely embodied truth: “we’ve got balls in our face and dirt in our shoes hot shit red blood cum stains on the inside pocket.” It’s an outlaw manifesto, one that echoes the rough-edged honesty of Bukowski and the moral reckoning of Diane di Prima.

Yet beneath the bravado and blue-collar grit, there’s a tenderness that keeps surfacing—often quietly, almost by accident. In “any day now” and “it’s not so bad,” the poet turns her gaze to the broken ordinary: the woman on the back steps without electricity, the extension cord looping over her head, the rabbits in the trash-lot cage. McDannold doesn’t romanticize these lives; she gives them their full measure of exhaustion and endurance. Her empathy isn’t sentimental—it’s rooted in recognition.

The West Coast Notebook series anchors the middle of the collection, chronicling McDannold’s move through Los Angeles and the mythic edge of America with the eye of a poet who has seen the whole ride from the ground up. These pieces—half travelogue, half elegy—trace a country fraying at its seams: “studies show even the helicopters are in on it.” Here, her humor turns darkly satirical, her tone wry and wise: “oh you writer people, aren’t you so cute with your angst & rebellion.” The “West Coast” poems record the geography of the lost—addicts, poets, and other dreamers trying to make rent and meaning in the same breath.

The later poems grow more introspective, haunted by love’s aftermath and the small devastations of aging. In “spacetime continuum for dummies,” memory collapses into grief with the disarming simplicity of someone too tired to lie anymore: “tick tick tick / in the morning we did not say goodbye.” Pieces like “simple question” and “the science of breaking up” show McDannold refining her raw voice into something crystalline and devastating.

The Prose Poems section — particularly “Dear Raving Lunatic” and “String Theory” –reveals another layer of her craft: surreal, expansive meditations where her working-class lyricism meets speculative metaphysics. Her prose is musical and jagged, filled with strange humor and melancholy wisdom.

Throughout, McDannold’s language is fearless. She writes with a directness that feels both confrontational and cleansing, like she’s trying to scrape the truth clean of artifice. There’s sex, madness, poverty, and longing — but always, always, an undercurrent of resilience.

Collected Poems 2005–2025 is not an easy book, nor should it be. It is a living document of a poet unafraid to look into the abyss and still find a way to laugh, love, and write it down. It belongs on the same shelf as Wanda Coleman, Lyn Lifshin, and Charles Bukowski — not as imitation, but as continuation.

Michele McDannold has written the kind of book that reminds us what poetry is for: to name the mess, to survive it, and to make something wild and human from the wreckage.

Get signed copies of Collected Poems 2005-2025 at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/mcdannold/JMDD4CUBDLEFXOYFSLSBIILG

While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan.  In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Dec 02

THIS IS WHERE YOU ARE by Nicholas Claro reviewed by Alan Catlin

first published in Misfit Magazine, Editor Alan Catlin

Nicholas Claro, This Is Where You Are, Roadside Press, www.roadsidefam.com distributed by www.magicaljeep.com, 2025, 155 pages, $18

Claro’s first book comes burdened with a blurb , “reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s classic story collections” and “In the tradition of Carver and Dubus.”  I say burdened as those two guys are the masters of the hard-nosed, gritty realism that dominated the short fiction scene in the closing decades of 1900’s.  Fortunately, Claro is up to the task of replicating the master’s work with equally as vivid, ordinary people usually in the late stage of a disintegrating relationship.  As I read these, basically read the collection straight through, I kept thinking oh, yeah, Carver.  There are going nowhere marriages, losers, drinkers, shattered families unable to cope with life-altering emergencies, heinous neighbor’s wearing A2 t-shirts and owning 14 (count them) raucous dogs who never, ever stop barking.  Even the brief, one is only a single paragraph, pieces are effective and well appointed. Realism in fiction is alive and well and Nichloas Claro belongs in the forefront of the next wave of short fiction writers of note.

—Alan Catlin, author of The Work Anxiety Poems and others

Nov 27

THE SCREW CITY POEMS by Richard Vargas reviewed by Alan Catlin

Richard Vargas, The Screw City Poems, 2025, 136 pages, $18

If you were expecting heavily charged erotica here due to the title, Screw City you will likely be disappointed. Not that there isn’t sex, there is some, married, break up sex, hook up sex but “Screw City” refers to  a small midwestern city (Rockford, IL) that was once known for manufacturing screws (much like the town where our son taught Westfield, MA is “buggy whip city” (really!) and once upon a time Utica, N.Y. where I went to college, was “Handshake City”)

This collection is a kind of “Best of Vargas” compiling poems from four previous collections that were published over the years. These are all crisp narratives often depicting the drudgery of working nowhere jobs that everyone needs to do, at some point, just to get by. Vargas is as good as anyone at revealing just how demeaning, senseless and frustrating these jobs can be.  The collection closes with an excerpt of a prose work in progress that has a promising direction though you just know the bar hookups (those St Pauli girls) are going to get you to a place you don’t want to be, somewhere along the line.

Nov 26

LITTLE GRAVEYARDS by Aleathia Drehmer reviewed by Alan Catlin

first published in misfit magazine, Editor Alan Catlin

Aleathia Drehmer, Little Graveyards, 2025, 66 pages, $15

Little Graveyards is a small, easily transportable book that will easily fit into your purse or back pocket. I highly recommend taking the poems with you, reading a couple at a time, and saving the rest for later. Aleathia works in health care, if these poems are all based in fact, which I am sure they are, is mostly with aging, near-death people.  Even when she is dealing with significant cancer issues of her own, she is thinking of others. The proportion of poems here devoted to herself (one ) to the people she tends to (most of the rest.) is significant. There is no hand wringing or “woe is me,” for this lady. She is that rare person who feels, and conveys, total empathy for someone, clearly dying, who wants someone to respect their life memories as important; their lives mattered, small and as unknown as they may have been, simply because they are human. When she is moved to tears at a person’s deeply felt memories of loved ones you feel moved with her. When I reach the end of the line I would like someone like Aleathia there to hold my hand or just to be that kind face, that someone who really cares.

—Alan Catlin

Oct 26

Michele McDannold’s Collected Poems: 2005–2025 — Twenty Years in ink

Roadside Press is proud to announce Collected Poems: 2005–2025 by Michele McDannold, releasing December 6, 2025—on the poet’s 51st birthday. This 300-page collection gathers two decades of McDannold’s poetry, including complete sections from Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days and By Plane, Train or Coincidence, along with nearly seventy-five pages of previously uncollected work.

McDannold, founder and editor of Roadside Press, has built her career documenting the grit, humor, and heartbreak of working-class and outsider life. Her poems are unflinching dispatches from the margins—raw, reflective, and full of fight. Collected Poems isn’t just a book; it’s a testament to survival, the poetry that comes out of busted knuckles, road miles, and the long haul toward meaning.

“No one tells you exactly how it is like McDannold. The poems are relatable, soul-crushing, painfully honest… There is love in here—sometimes sweet, but mostly jaded. It is a collection to keep by the bedside.”
—Aleathia Drehmer, author of Little Graveyards

“McDannold sees clearly into a broken world, crafting words that cut to the bone, exposing raw beauty and pain while offering needed truth for lost and aching souls.”
—Steven Meloan, author of St. James Infirmary

With poems that move between motel rooms, small towns, internet wastelands, and the backroads of America, Collected Poems: 2005–2025 reads like a survival map scratched out in truth and gasoline.

Pre-order signed copies at magicaljeep.com

Contact: roadsidepress01@gmail.com | www.roadsidefam.com

Sep 18

Nathan Graziano examines ‘A Better Loser’ in new story collection

New Hampshire’s Nathan Graziano returns with another cast of unforgettable characters in a new linked story collection 23 years after his debut, ‘Frostbite’.

After more than two decades, Manchester writer Nathan Graziano has finally followed up on his debut short story collection, Frostbite (Green Bean Press, 2002). On Oct. 21, Roadside Press, an independent press in Illinois, will publish Graziano’s new book A Better Loser.

In A Better Loser, Nathan Graziano’s new collection of linked short stories, his characters are losing their battles to preserve their dignity and self-respect, which continues to disappear in front of them. Whether facing romantic troubles, addiction, or struggling to keep their passions in check, these characters will not allow their failures to define them—they are learning to become “better losers.” Set in Southern New Hampshire, Graziano introduces readers to a cast that includes amateur magicians, struggling musicians, hirsute giants, runaway teenagers, and restless local journalists. Now, Graziano returns with a new round of working-class tales that combine wry humor and a hard—and sometimes dark—look at the relationships that define us.

Exeter’s Todd Hearon—the author of Do Geese See God and Crows in Eden and a musician whose recent album Yolelady has received critical acclaim—has praised Graziano’s new book.

“Reading Nathan Graziano’s latest collection of interlocking stories is a little like waking in a morning-after fog, with the sinking realization that the stranger crashed beside you in the bed happens to be you,” Hearon writes. “It’s that dire—and it’s funny as hell.  Graziano’s eye is at once relentless and sympathetic, and his style is an accelerometer, attuned to the subtlest of emotional vibrations; he wears his fuckups, wayward kids and dysfunctional adults, like a second skin.  The biggest win (to my mind) of A Better Loser is the author’s skill at registering, often simultaneously, the heart-wrenching and hilarious, holding out to the bitter end the sliver of redemption—hard-won and entirely unexpected—that shines like a strand of gold amid the mass of human wreckage.  Once the haze of pot smoke, booze and painkillers clears, this cast of losers will stay with you for a long, long time.”

A Better Loser is Graziano’s eleventh full-length book, and in many ways, his most ambitious. He is the author of four other works of fiction, his most recent being the novella Fly Like The Seagull (Luchador Press, 2021) as well as six collections of poetry.

A high school English teacher at Pembroke Academy and an adjunct professor at Southern New Hampshire University, Graziano’s other works include Not So Profound (GBP, 2003) Teaching Metaphors (Sunnyoutside Press, 2007), After the Honeymoon (Sunnyoutside Press, 2009) Hangover Breakfasts (Bottle  of Smoke Press, 2012), Some Sort of Ugly (Marginalia Publishing, 2013), My Next Bad Decision (Artistically Declined Press, 2014), Almost Christmas (Redneck Press, 2017) and Born on Good Friday (Roadside Press, 2023).

A graduate of the MFA writing program at The University of New Hampshire, Graziano is also an award-winning columnist for Manchester Ink Link and has contributed nonfiction work in publications such New Hampshire Magazine, The Good Man Project, The Huffington Post and BostonMan Magazine.

The book release is scheduled for Nov. 8 at Pembroke City Limits in Suncook Village.

Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester with his wife, Liz, and a pug named Buster. He is available for readings, signings, speaking engagements or interviews at the contact information below.

For more information on Graziano:
Website: www.nathangraziano.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathangrazianowriter

Jul 21

Excerpt from PERSEVERANCE: THE MAKING OF A MUSICIAN by Steven Grey

Please Die & Everything – Part 4: Fuckin’ Lenny

On the off days from my main two jobs, I still did the sales job whenever I could. We all hung out outside of work to various degrees as well. Something must have happened to Lenny’s car at some point because I remember giving him rides occasionally. He did the same for me when I didn’t have a car, so he’d earned it.

This dude begged me—literally begged me—to take him all the way across town so he could see his girlfriend for like twenty minutes. It was only because of this prolonged, pitiful begging that I finally relented and took him. As we began the drive, I must provide the context that it did not appear that Lenny had anything on his person.

We were driving.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said.

“Yeah it’s cool, I guess. Just try not to take forever because I have to work tomorrow, you know.”

“Yeah man, I get it.”

I let the silence ride. Dusk began to fade into night. The last bit of light was leaving the sky. We were on a long stretch of a lonely two-lane road. There weren’t too many cars out that night. The only investment I’d made into my new-to-me car was a fifteen-dollar tape adapter, but I got it from my new job at the electronic store, so it was like five bucks after my discount. I had music playing—I always did. If I had a friend in the car, I’d keep it low enough not to inhibit conversation.

“I love this song,” Lenny said.

It was a song he had introduced me to. It was maybe the only musical thing we had in common.

“Yeah, I know. Me too,” I replied.

It was a damn good song.

Silence again, except for the music. As we cruised through that serene little slice of Kentucky—stars starting to shine in the night sky, as the trees became clouds of black that whizzed by on the ground—the peaceful silence was broken by an unmistakable sound.

Krrchhhk!

That was the sound of a can being opened. I looked over at Lenny, who I could’ve earlier sworn didn’t look like he had an entire unopened aluminum can just in his fucking pocket, and this mother fucker is hunched over with puckered lips about to take a sip of a PBR, which, hailing from Chicago, I was sure was responsible for 70% of all beer sales.

“Dude, what the absolute fuck do you think you are doing!?” I yelled, breaking the silence.

“Dude, what? It’s just a beer!”

“You can’t have an open container in a car!”

“I’m not even driving!”

“It doesn’t matter, that’s still illegal! Did you seriously not know that!?”

“No, dude. Sorry. Here, I’ll chug it.”

“No, don’t chug it, get rid of it!”

“Well, I’m not going to waste it!” he said, immediately before shotgunning the beer in about nine seconds.

“Fine, whatever, just throw it out the window.”

He did so.

“…Thank you!” I said, clearly frustrated.

I sighed—let the stress out—got back to driving. Hopefully, it would just be a chill drive again. I thought about how maybe it could be theoretically possible that this dude could’ve been sheltered enough—in just the right way—that he might have missed that it’s illegal to have an open beer in a moving car. He was still fairly young. I believe he was nineteen—maybe twenty—which reminds me that I’m not sure how he readily had access to beer at that age. But either way, that was done. At least he knew now. Nothing bad happened. I’ll let it go, I guess. The silence breathed again. I was back to focusing on the road and the peaceful Kentucky night sky.

Krrchhhk!

I look over, and this motherfucker has another beer in hand.

“Are you absolutely godamn serious right now?!”

“You said to get rid of the beer! I’m getting rid of the beer!”

He began to chug.

Steven Grey is a musician, writer, and artist hailing primarily from Chicago, where he lives with his very good dog, Koda. He graduated as a film major and has worked with noteworthy writers and directors throughout the industry. Steven is the lead singer, primary creative force, and sole lyricist behind the band Shards of Grey, which led to his becoming a producer for several other musical acts. Blending these two art forms, his first album with Shards of Grey and his first book are tandem concepts that tell the same story through the lens of different mediums.

Perseverance: The Making of a Musician (a novel) by Steven Grey is now available for pre-order at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/perseverance/200

Additionally, check out some of the audio from the Perseverance album! https://shardsofgrey.bandcamp.com/track/please-die-everything

Jun 24

NIGHT BIRD FLYING by Danny Shot reviewed by Alan Catlin

first published in misfit magazine, Editor Alan Catlin

Danny Shot, Night Bird Flying, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep also available on Amazon, 2025, 130 pages $17

I might as well get this out of the way up front, if I had to create a list of the top ten small press mags since I stared publishing in the 70s, Danny Shot’s Long Shot would be on it.  Wormwood will always be number one because the incomparable editor Marvin Malone. We should aspire to and try to be half the editor he was. After that, well there was some great ones and Long Shot had it all going especially around the time of 9-11 when everything was turning to shit in a major way. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying, they published me several times, so if that suggests I have a conflict of interest, well, so be it. I do my best to be subjective.

So, okay, I loved this book beginning with the whacko cover girl with the lightning bolt underarm hair, holding down the fort by a café table covered in empty Bud cans cigarette butts, an almost empty cheap bottle of Vodka; the usual detritus of a night of hard drinking. We later meet the cover girl as Cinful Cindy, gonzo pal of his lost love Carla, the subject of the longest story in the book, “What a Wonderful World.”

I confess I have a thing about Night Bird Flying, the title of the book, which conjures up memories of Allison Steele the night DJ on WNEW FM in the late 60s early 70s who is a minor background character in “What a Wonderful World”. I can still hear Allison’s tag line,

The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the sounds of the night, as the Nightbird spreads her wings and soars, above the earth, into another level of comprehension, where we exist only to feel. Come, fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird, at WNEW-FM, until dawn.

Those of us who came of age in those halcyon years, later recalled the sixties were largely overrated (especially if you were military draft eligible or about to be). The thing about the 60’s really was “the only truly great stuff that came out of that era were sports (especially New York sports) and the music.” And when you think of the music, you think of prog rock, smoking doobies, and Allison Steele. She was like the Maltese Falcon. She was the stuff dreams were made of.

Danny Shot gets this.

Early stories in his collection take place in Dumont, NJ where he grew up. I have a personal connection with Dumont as back I the late 60s my Summer job was working in a soft ice cream/ Italian Ice stand on Sunrise Highway on the Island in Lynbrook NY.  Kitty corner to the stand was a triangular point behind the Esso station that had, for one summer, a sculptor renting the property. It was my bright idea to commission a concrete ice cream cone for a Christmas Present for our beloved boss, Don “Bonehead” Wilson and to deliver it as a surprise staff gift to his home in Dumont NJ.  And we did, somehow managing to transport it across the Verrazano Narrows bridge along with three adults in a Nash Rambler. Do you know how much a four-foot high, custom-made concrete ice cream cone weighs? I don’t know precisely, but a lot covers it. So, if you ever drove by a house in Dumont in the late 60s that had a giant concrete cone on the porch, it was all my fault.

Growing up in Dumont was a lot like growing up on Long Island, as I did, around the same time as many of these stories. I am a few years older than Danny and the drugs weren’t quite as prevalent as they were in his day (though they would be soon). By mid-60s, if you knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew someone else….and there were rumors of heroin around, but not that anyone actually saw any. Of course, in a couple of years, guys from the National Honor Society were getting busted in their dorm rooms. I can relate to all of the experiences the young narrator tells us to the point you wonder what is fiction and what is memoir. The opening story hooked me right in, “Ich bin ein New Yorker.” He then proceeds to outline all the ways he is not, geographically anyway, actually a New Yorker but, in fact, a Jersey boy and everyone from New York knows: People from Jersey suffer from New Yorker envy.

Personally, I grew up in the shadow of New York and the first thing I wanted to do, once I was old enough, was to get the hell out. But that’s just me. My dislike and disdain only grew after years of working Upstate, N.Y., working with the spawn of the City’s elite. They all seem to think because their dad works in finance and is a white-collar criminal, or he works for the mob and is an actual  criminal, they are beyond special. All the rest of the people in the world, are service workers who don’t count, because my dad can buy their dads and everything they thought of owning. Whatever. I used to love telling them your credit is no good here. But I digress.

There is no question the final piece, “Death of a Poet,” is fact or fiction. It is clearly a memoir piece and it burns a hole in your heart. This essay/memoir is an absolutely shattering piece about the last days of Neo Beat poet Andy Claussen and his partner Pamela Twinning. I read with both of those guys a couple of times. I saw Andy read elsewhere and that was an experience that is rarely duplicated as few poets could outshine Claussen on stage. I can’t say I knew Andy or Pamela well, but having read both the books Shot speaks of in this essay, their final publications, I feel close to them in spirit.

The essay tells the story backwards in twenty short sections beginning with Andy near the end of his steep decline, asking if he is dying. Clearly, he was, but the real genius of the piece is the traveling backwards in lives well-lived, to the beginning of his and Pamela’s decline. All stories end the same but it is the getting there, the telling of it, that makes the story special. Shot has created one of the most completing tribute essays to fellow writers I have ever read.

On the negative side, Shot includes a throwaway, a male fantasy piece, that I can only compare with Phillip Roth’s unfortunate Kafka the stand-up comedian pastiche, The Breast. Shot’s is called “The Big Dick.” Enough said. It is especially jarring as it comes directly after the Bob Dylanesque, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” evoking long story about his lost love, “What a Wonderful World.” That story feels so real it has to be true even if it isn’t. Ever love madly, truly, deeply? This is the story for you, then, and while it is doomed from the outset, it doesn’t feel either sentimental or maudlin; a rare achievement. “The Big Dick.” Well, The Breast wasn’t funny either.

—Alan Catlin