Sipping Coffee @ Carmela's

Despite the dedicatio/warning-"not for everyone"-this book is indeed for everyone. Joe Amato is a straight talker able to weave those tough gossamer gab lines into strands for a dinger of a poetry rope lassoing the facts. The work's (manu)facture enlivens an endangered species: a poetry of facts, with which he drives a word-stake through the American (wet) dream. Hear, hear him, comrades, read Amato's hoarse-powered ode for this "Poor dumb oilrigged hydrofracked Fukushima'd bastard / civilization"-though there is nothing oily about his message, because "Wethinks poetry is crude, baby, fundamentally crude." And needs to be so in/for a country where "we note what strange fruit falls / with supremacist fictions run amok." This "blues that stays news," these "Urgencies of some noirceur, police / state tactics..." need a poetry-vérité as we speak of a cinéma vérité and Joe Amato's eye & ear for these Younighted States-close cousins to Jean Rouch's hand-held camera-manage to scan an "Earth that at its best is one hell of a / paradise."

- Pierre Joris, author of An American Suite & A Nomad Poetics