Post-modern American Poetry, 108 pp. "Mitch Corber, a stalwart member & chronicler of NYC's poetry community for decades, explores/reveals in this his first major volume of work 'veiled moons, ' 'creaky cabinets, ' 'weekend binges' & so much more -- with dark, humorous, romantic & experimental, at times cut-up/random-seeming verses infused with internal rhyme & wordplay connecting the commonplace with the metaphysical through meditative 'sporadic nibbling' & 'a mosaic of moods.'" -Steve Dalachinsky "Poet Mitch Corber's 'Weather's Feather' is "raw testimony" to love, desire, loss and rage that exists within "the sum of forgiveness." A steadfast and creative presence in New York's downtown poetry scene, Mitch Corber knows the mercurial intensities of its liaisons and its allures. Its passions are his: 'Gentle me a symmetry of delayed/desire lit by a clientele of electricity.' Workdays become occasions where 'fond flowers fish for a wish, ' and the whims of climate and ardor are enhanced by 'shy resurfacings.'" -Star Black "Mitch Corber is a Dylan Thomas for the Hip Hop generation. 'I lace words' is his throwdown, and he ain't kidding around. "Weather's Feather" is a unique contribution to post-Beat poetry as Corber is tapping into the experimental poetics of The Beats as found in Kerouac's 'Old Angel Midnight, ' Ray Bremser's bop prosody, Burroughs' cut-up experiments and Corso's 'Gasoline.' I'll toast this new volume with the author's favorite drink: 'a sinkful of gladdened magnets.'" -Joel Lewis "Mitch Corber dances on a poetic highwire gleaning meaning from the verbal swarm that envelops us. Brawn and beauty mix it up in balletic bouquets of "seething" syntax fusions. Sinuous verse pulses with mystery and affirmation, aspiration and defeat. Beguiling and edgy, Corber's voice is authentic, complex and heady, like a grandy brandy that's been aged in a hollowed-out dictionary. Between sparkling bon mots and startling juxtapositions, Mitch seeks and finds the fine line where the personal meets the communal. -Jeffrey Cyphers Wright "Corber was introduced to poetry through nursery rhymes. He took off from there and never looked back. His flights of fancy display love, loneliness, impermanence, the joys of imagination, and unexpected ascents and descents. No one ever knows where one of his poems will land. And no two trips are alike. This is a book for worldly travelers who never tighten their seatbelts." -George Spencer "Mitch Corber, grassroots documentarian of East Village poetry scene for decades, here shows that his vérité eye goes bongo gonzo when flipped into his interior abyss. He asks, 'Have you seen my pesky porcupine, /her spiny tingle, those naughty needles?' and while everybody else might just say Noooo, for Mitch it's an everyday experience. What's in those needles? Surrealist syringes, jazz bops and verbal nonstops...! Teddy B (Berrigan) puts in an appearance (on Avenue C) - he is La Bohème, with Corber strutting like Lord Buckley to get hiperama. His are the Beatles of 'The Eggman.' Take two poems and call him in the morning. Name a poem 'Pyrex Bowl.' Don't take an answer for an answer. Goo goo ga-joob. Mitch Corber is the Mad Taxidermist, and language is his prey.-Bob Holman "Mitch Corber comes to us from out of nowhere, yet very much from out of somewhere. He can write love 'in the proxy of praxis'- where lovemaking is akin to poesis. A sensitive ear to assonance and rhyme, and love of the unsettling word, fuels Corber's lyric metric. He does not so much explore as navigate. He seems to dwell in the metaphysic, rather than the street, though his sense of human, and particularly romantic, relation is vivid. His metaphysic is a valuable tool for living, existing as it must in what he terms 'the lethal diamond dream.'" -Vincent Katz

Collected poems, 1967-2012 From the Foreword by Jack Hirschman, former Poet Laureate of San Francisco: "I think I can say a few words about what makes American poetry tick..., and by way of that indicate the importance of this book and John Curl in the pantheon of revolutionary poets... it is 'transform, transform' that John Curl is forever sounding and resounding with his depth charges... We're talking about transforming a society totally in which process poetry serves as a beaconing forward. Curl's signature achievement linguistically, it seems to me, is to have developed a language where lines of images often are contrary to one another and that friction or opposition does more than 'surrealize' the lines (Curl knows the techniques of all the avant-garde poetry movements of the 20th century)-what he is writing is often a poetry of dialectical motion itself. The singular intent behind John's writing is to actualize in poetry the urgent need for working-class consciousness, ... and Curl succeeds in so many poems and in so many imaginings in this book that one realizes that Revolutionary Alchemy is a book of major importance. John Curl... has earned a place-with this book of poems-among the foremost revolutionary American poets since the end of WW2." From Sharon Doubiago, National Book Award nominee: "John Curl's Revolutionary Alchemy is a magnificent account of a radical poet's work, the lifetime of poems, the inner story of an important generation, its psyche, the history. What deep and meaningful pleasure to read this alchemy, mix of love with the bombs. 'I cried when I heard the war was over and/ when I remember/the war still rages on/ I cry again...To resolve my pain I/must resolve yours....'" From Art Goodtimes, Poet Laureate of the Western Slope: "The procreative force, the cosmic sensibility, the oracular insight Curl brings to the reader is constantly astonishing. These poems help define and give rise to a verse of the surreal poetarian vision of the left. Here unrealism attempts to seize and transform imperialist reality. Curl writes like the lead miner in a pit crew. As such, he is a major poet on the people's side. There is not a thing to be bought off in his poems, there is only the amazement of truth." From Mary Rudge, author of Water Planet: "A Master Poet who uses language in a remarkable, innovative way, he gives us information on contradictions in the evolving state of human consciousness. The tensile lines of these poems are a strong loom holding the strength of an interwoven theme of Social Justice making deliberate design through the poet's understanding of actions and attitudes. John Curl shows us the undersides of clouds and cultures but also shows immutable order in chaos. He can, in a single poem, give at least 15 ways of changing personal, social, political darkness, including purification by fire. Though some are seemingly surreal, strange and new, your intellect tells you each line is someone's reality at the core."

Review The Answer Is In The Garden Asie (sheherazade) Cash The Debut (ode To Anna Moffo) Doctor Type Dog Bite Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: I Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Ii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Iii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Iv Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Ix Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: V Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Vi Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Vii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Viii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: X Est-ce Que Fantasia On My Father's Gift Faust In Seersucker Shorts Fugitive Blue A History Of Private Life L'indifferent (sheherazade) La Flute Enchantee (sheherazade) The Letter (ode To Anna Moffo) The Moving Occupations The Ornate And Lovely Corner House A Professor Young And Old Relics Of The True Cross The Square Of Swan Tea Dance -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® From Publishers Weekly In the title poem and centerpiece of this debut collection, 1989 "Discovery"/ Nation poetry award co-winner Koestenbaum writes, "Mired in low culture, / I was aching to reach the high."41 But it is precisely the low that allows him to exult in the lavish heights of the Metropolitan Opera, idolizing a diva who rises above the mundane only in her performances. Koestenbaum's own performances are formal and fluidly elegant: "I think that Anna / Moffo sings, / to this day, in a second, / parallel Met, a hologram of the original / projected in air, / where failing voices continue / to thrive amidst a system of strange geysers / and girders, cables / linking the golden prompter's box / to a sky that burns directly on the stage."45 His wit can become self-conscious, his metaphors heavy, but the unifying strength of the poems is Koestenbaum's burgeoning awareness of being gay, with all its emotional ramifications: "Thinking I was invisible, I wore the peacock / Blue and found I was too visible. I wanted to shock / My public into cheers, until I learned that they were primitives . . . / When Carla put her hand on Ricky's knee / I saw my future's blueprint. I was wearing pants of lapis lazuli."11 Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Half operatic libretto, half slangy conversation, Koestenbaum's first book of poems interweaves sophisticated urban wit with a sense of lost happiness ("I am a landlord of a sadness"). With Anna Moffo, well-known coloratura soprano (born in 1932 in Wayne, Pennsylvania) as muse and "favorite," Koestenbaum explores role-playing, sexual identity, friendship, homoeroticism, and art as a refuge from psychic discontinuity. Through his rapid-fire digressions and formally rhyming arpeggios emerges a longing for elusive interpersonal realities "in which the secret life is fully seen." "I read/ these urgent things too quickly, as if I were not fixed/ By what occurs, as cats, cards, and elections/ Are fixed." Koestenbaum's extravagant fantasies nurse "a foolish daydream" of opera as a metaphor of life. "I mail/ this letter,/ addressed to Miss Moffo, care/ of the mind's Met, where Broadway joins forgotten avenues."-- Frank Allen, SUNY at CobleskillCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Book 3 of the Into My Life Unexpected series, "Finding Love", Mr. Kaufman tells again in prose and poetry, the emotional and romantic story of the first year of the love affair he had been so long searching for. As he reveals more of his life story and how he came to this place and time, we share in the joy and power of "Finding Love"