I teach high school English. My students are wild about this book. That's all I have to say, and an astute reader will recognize immediately that nothing more need be said.

This is a necessary and important book. Anselm Hollo's incisive comments on the back cover are right on the mark. "In a world whose corporate neo-feudalist movers and shakers do not want us to pay attention to history--do not want us to remember anything much beyond today's hot commercial--poets like Charles Reznikoff, Ernesto Cardenal, and now, Mark Pawlak, dedicate themselves to a work whose value reaches far beyond the merely documentary. Pawlak's poems in Special Handling... form a constellation that demonstrates how truly appalling a planet can become when (and where) the mercenary and deluded run the show. In the Bardo of the Newspaper Morgue, Mark Pawlak is a steady and keen-eyed framer of instances of human behavior that are pretty damn unforgettable. The resulting texts do not need commentary, they don't even need this note; but they do need to be read, and contemplated." These poems were like a splash of cold water startling me to wakefulness. I'll never again read the newspaper or watch the evening TV news, lulled into passivity by the talk of commentators and politicians.I found some of the poems haunting.