Peter Schwartz’s chapbook, Old Men, Girls, and Monsters, is now available for purchase from the Achilles Chapbook Series.
Check out the blurb action:
“Restless and visceral — the poems in Old Men, Girls, and Monsters howl like prisoners in dark cages as they mutate one’s perception of reality from under their bandages and punctured-origami fragility. An intensely gripping collection.” –-Arlene Ang
“The suffering which permeates this meticulously constructed collection of remembrances is truly haunting. Schwartz creates an unearthly world where one is embraced by the experience of wounding: if it hurts you, be glad that you can still feel.” –-Alexis Apfelbaum
“Peter Schwartz’s poems collect our hard-won confessions, our fragile constructions, our temporary homes and our more permanent losses, but not for the purpose of hoarding them away. Instead, Schwartz organizes these obsessions into new structures–complex and beautiful poems–inviting us to experience their transformations. He writes ‘I’ve always had a certain love for exits,’ and yet, what do we have here? Nothing more or less than a collection of intricate entrances, doorways through which to come in together, as celebrants, as mourners, as readers.” –Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found
And an excerpt:
I’ve always had a certain love for exits
you see a permanent immigrant to more bachelorhood
than strictly necessary, me giving in
to the pollution like weak tea, me as chops and
giant blocks, a paperboy with the taste of ashes
in his friendly fingers or a
reporter with no news, a robot of light
bicycling backwards from the gravity, shirt off
set to kill the haze: I see
exits everywhere, library or restaurant
hospital or airport, roads already tilting towards their
sequels, regeneration in a
black hole, reversed dollars, missing owls
I’m your meaty amnesia, your continuous
last chance, your fire escape:
your super crutch.
Is this one of those literary mash-ups? A reworking, perhaps, of Chekhov’s classic OLD MEN & YOUNG GIRLS*, but now featuring MONSTERS?
*The little-known alternate title of UNCLE VANYA.
(If so, then perchance those monsters are wood demons?)
Ah, this is Peter. My collection is not a mash-up of any kind but that’s interesting to know I’m a little Chekhovy. Thanks.
Like all critics, I’m happy to tell you what your writing’s really about.
Congratulations on the chapbook!
Chekhovy – I like that. It could be the name of a love seat.
Thanks Molly and Peter.
Peter scares me and that is what makes him so enjoyable to read. Here is an interview he just completed with Ben Tanzer. http://www.orangealert.net/schwartz