…[Y]ou should read this book… . By turns earthy and incantatory, down-home and harrowing, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is also funny as hell and, to quote one of its nearly 20,000 lines, “sadder than the sea.” A narrative crazy-quilt of porch swing yarns, deadly reckonings, and sexual misadventures, it could be called one of the masterpieces of Southern literature on the strength of its characters alone–narrator Francis Gildart, a 12-year-old clairvoyant; Jimmy, his hell-raising brother; Jimmy’s running buddy, Charlie B. Lemon; Count Hugo Pantagruel, “the world’s smallest man”; Vico, the deaf-mute who signs in his sleep; Sylvester, whom Francis calls the Black Angel; Bobo, Baby Gauge, Mama Covoe, and Tangle Eye, with cameos by Sonny Liston and Jesus Christ. It just might be our Ulysses and, were it not a poem, might justly be considered for the Great American Novel. There’s certainly nothing like it in 20th-century American letters.

–Brett Ralph from Rain Taxi

Trench Town Rock, Kamau Brathwaite’s long documentarian song, affords insistent ‘nansic spin –a splay of clips, massed facts and faces, rare synaesthetic call and cry rolled into brash typographic distraint. Jimmied lines and real and would-be headlines lament the collapse of post-colonial promise into ongoing predation. The book says, “see see see until yu bline.”

-Nathaniel Mackey

When I first encountered Frank Stanford’s poetry…I felt a fine rush of hope and envy I feel occasionally whenever a poet’s language pushes me far beyond my own. Unruly and urgent, the poems stood out from the quieter meditations around them as pure dream, possibly nightmare, curiously lit from within.

–Leslie Ullman

In short, The Singing Knives might be best described as: Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch collaborate to direct and write a script for a psychological thriller about fishing, hunting and butchering starring the cast of the grown up little rascals who have matured into bloodthirsty criminals.

–Victor Schnickelfritz in The Great American Pinup

It is astonishing to me that I was not even aware of this superbly accomplished and moving poet. There is a great deal of pain in the poems, but it is a pain that makes sense, a tragic pain whose meaning rises from the way the poems are so firmly molded and formed from within.

–James Wright

Thank you for your visit.