…At the crossroads of assault and proceed, with the sweat dirty gun grease of law machines, amid thrill and lull, faithless young gods inured to guts swill black smoke, uniformed, flag-fetishistic do-good recruits who brace for sanity's sake (checkpoint!) sake (checkpoint!) the creed of pluck for country and pluck for self and die in the smithy of old gods' desires... They planned it. This, the goods your works produce."
—Design at Mahmoudiya
—from the Preface
Bold and forthright in observation, Damon takes in the look and feel of things, and in concert with his perceptions, finds language both simple and adequate to his task. Where his poems sing, it is in the quiet lyric of presence. Where they exult, it is with the exclamation of the moment of pure vision.—Parabola: Myth, Tradition and the Search for Meaning
"Clorfeine's day to day experiences read like a series of prose haikus...there is a clarity in his writing...a habit of seeing the ordinary and the extraordinary, the marvelous in the mundane..."—Woodstock Times
I’m tired
of making sense, of having to listen, of taking the ocean in day after day, of holding on to its labor; you have to let go—and it blanks out lost to the magnification of mind; when I fall asleep the muscle won’t let loose, my back slides, my hip hurries for doorways, my fingers talk as though they were held by a talking hand for an instant that turns off night, and it’s still noon, and the talking ocean just said it, just spoke the words that mean this loss is really here and you can’t turn it away and the doorways are slamming shut, the breakers are slamming down, the magnification of mind slamming down. I’m listening for doorways. —from Shorewards Tidewards—Dennis Sampson, author of Constant Longing and Needlegrass
—Chronogram
—Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge
—Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge
—Pauline Uchmanowicz, final judge
" 'Time is warping in the palace,' Laurence Carr observes in The Wytheport Tales. And our nights and days are warping in these sly, canny (or are they uncanny?) poems. Most interested in the world when that world is changing, and by turns in-flected, de-flected, and re-flected, here fanciful, there matter of fact, Carr's tales summon twilight presences from the edges of experience, dark, restless, playful, and urgent."
—Robert Polito, Director, New School Writing Program
"Though it seems to begin in the land of Dylan Thomas's Nightwood, it extends beyond that into wonderfully evocative, mythic worlds that strike me as utterly original in its language and pace."
—Robert H. Waugh, The Monster in the Mirror: Looking for H. P. Lovecraft
"With The Wytheport Tales, Laurence Carr gives us a work that shimmers and twists, that undulates across the mind's eye like a tapestry. At times homely, at others baroque, at still others nightmarish, the collection fits multitudes between its covers. I'm eternally grateful to have been introduced to a sampling of Wytheport's denizens, and look forward to many return visits."
—John Langan, Mr. Gaunt
"Winner of the 2012 Codhill Poetry Chapbook Award, Heather Cousins's Freeze, as sparse and elegant as winter branches, illuminates how time is both fixed and divisible, the human paradox both archetypal and mutable."
—Pauline Uchmanowicz, Final Judge
