With this book, August Kleinzahler -- already one of those fascinating poets who makes you glad that you live in the present moment -- has given us a strong, strange, unique and utterly memorable collection of poems. In poems like "Snow in New Jersey" and "Uttar Pradesh" he combines the textures and techniques of a short story writer with the roving eye of a documentary film-maker using a hand-held camera that allows him to venture anywhere and everywhere, with the result that the reader never knows where he is going next. There is more of a concern here with language in itself, that is, language considered as more than a mere medium of representation, than in his previous work (see "52 Pick-up"); yet at the same time, the new poems show more narrative and a greater facility for following complex, often associative patterns of thought. Best of all are the surprises -- to take just one (although admittedly my favorite) example, the twelfth line of "The Dog Stoltz," which practically knocked me off my feet. Kleinzahler's new poems are so contemporary, so accurate, so detailed, and so relevant that they put the front page of the New York Times to shame.

Lyric, unsentimental... moving... Kleinzahler demonstrates tremendous virtuoso as a poet, integrating the language of the city and the language of the heart into the pieces.

One of the very few contemporary poets today with a lyrical ear and a vision for a poetry that challenges what he calls the "professional neuroticism" of the neo-confessional poem and the vacant opacity of avant-gard poetics.

These poems hit close to home ... engaged in the city and all of its energy, loneliness, and paradoxes.

Augie,

I've been trying to remember what it was that you put in those Garibaldis. I know it was tuna, banana peppers, and some kind of cheese. What else? I been a jonesen. Let me know when you get a chance, will ya?

Yer a poet and yer rymes got rythem. Your gonna be really famous after you die. don't stop.

famous patatoes,
.......