Jun 22
first published at misfitmagazine.net John Pietaro, Innocent Postcards: poetry ciphers, verse, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep, also available on Amazon, 2024, 87 pages, $15 Moving back and forth throughout the Cold War years to the present, Pietaro’s unusual but affecting collection effectively renders a state of mind that was dominated by Cold War politics. I …
Jun 21
first published in misfitmagazine.net Todd Cirillo, Disposable Darlings, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep Distribution and available on Amazon, 2024, 84 pages, $15 Reading Cirillo put me in mind of working in the neighborhood bar and hanging out with the regulars. When I dedicate a book, as I often have, “to the regulars as they made life …
Jun 20
first published in misfitmagazine.net Dan Provost, All in a Pretty Little Row, Roadside Press, Magical Jeep Distribution, available on Amazon, 196 pages, 2023, $15 All in a Pretty Little Row, collects ten of Provost’s chapbooks published over the past 20 years. Some of these are rarely seen, extremely limited editions, so this recent trend by prolific poets to …
Jun 09
“… he clarified his intention, which was “beat” as beatific, as in “dark night of the soul,” or “cloud of unknowing,” the necessary beatness of darkness that proceeds opening up to light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination.”—Allen Ginsberg In some ways, Gregory Corso represented a darkness within a darkness: a beat within the Beat. …
May 24
Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s These Many Cold Winters of the Heart begins with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson “I am out with lanterns looking for myself,” a perfect depiction of this collection. You will be riveted from the opening poem, “I Grew Up in a Brewery Town,” where the Molson plant closes down but “people survived, they usually …
May 03
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Roadside Press Unveils Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet, an Unprecedented Tribute Release Date: June 20, 2024 Available via magicaljeep.com, Amazon, Ingram, and Major Online Book Retailers In the annals of American literature, the Beat Generation remains a luminous chapter, resonating with the harmonious blend of rebellion and creativity that defined an …
Apr 24
![The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton [hardcover book]](https://roadsidefam.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/435691018_2269411643399833_4817135716184713194_n-263x300.jpg)
1. I never intended to live in Ohio again in the first place. After my first divorce, and all the ensuing debacles; a rehab here, probation there, a dab or two of homelessness, or years of barely clinging to a roof over my head, and I found myself drunk and alone a lot, watching the …
Apr 20
Heather Dorn, How to Play House, Roadside Press, 2023, 116 pages $15 “Heather Dorn is a real mom with real life issues. She’s more Journal of a Mad Housewife than Kate Middleton, though she’s not a stuck at home mom going crazy with her kids but a PhD in English Literature who teaches at the …
Apr 17
Because, Brian I liked you at first, because your dad fixed a flat on my mom’s Pontiac in his robe, and because of your black jelly bean eyes and big-toothed laugh, and because you almost almost rubbed my thigh. But I bought off-the-shoulder homecoming velvet for someone else, because of your seaweed smell, because of …
Apr 16
abandoned by all things my brother phones late at night, he’s been drinking again, asking if I might write a few poetic lines in honor of our dead father so Richie G can temporarily immortalize the words on his forearm below the half-finished angel, a tribute to a dad he vaguely remembers from his early …
