Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist

Poetry. Perhaps it is best to picture this book as a gallery space, for in NOTES FOR THE NOVICE VENTRILOQUIST, Gerry LaFemina curates an exhibit of the curious and quirky. Surrealist art, big foot, magic shows, mythological creatures, love in all its manifestations hang side by side on these pages. Each prose poem is a painted canvas in which the real and what-may-be-real are framed together. Sometimes laugh-til-you-cry funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always fantastic in the truest sense, these modern fables posit the endless possibilities of both the imagination and the ordinary world.

'"What joy. What uncompromised and uncomplicated pleasure without the pretense of the huzzah,' Lafemina says in his prose poem, 'The Exuberance of a Well-Timed Yay.' That's how I feel while reading NOTES FOR THE NOVICE VENTRILOQUIST. In this volume LaFemina weds old-school existential profundity with contemporary wit, and, in the process, establishes himself as one of the best prose poets writing today."—Peter Johnson

"The lonely characters that yearn for others' shadows that inhabit LaFemina's world escape from the dangerously mundane by zeroing in on the extraordinary details they overhear as these shadows relate their nostalgia for an ordinary life far out of the spotlight."—Gian Lombardo