In these clear forecasts of the recent past, Erik La Prade frees the reader to say an eternal Aloha to his phantom New York, a place everyone thinks they know and own, and its “remnants of an unenclosed frontier." All times happen at once here, which is why it takes so long to get across town, and which is also why nothing stays ripped up for long, and everything reverts to the “lived-in look.” A companionable observer inhabits these poems. Why not stay a while?
— Jordan Davis
By its sheer dazzling wit, gorgeous word play and poignant insight, SWATCHES delivers a great winking comeuppance to the American poetry establishment. His verse provides the sort of heartfelt vision quite absent from the bulk of today's poetry: a sophisticated almost epistolatory sense of intimacy shared from his innermost being; a private history that unfolds against the backdrop of New York City and its public events. Here are love and loss, friendship, memory, aspiration and the tasks of living conveyed in terms that evoke the larger urban setting and that prove the city to be nothing less then the reflection and echoes of our own inner selves and struggle.
—Alan Kaufman, author of Matches; editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry
SWATCHES
by Erik La Prade
ISBN 978-0-9817678-1-9
Soft Cover, Saddle Stitched, 19 pp.
$8.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)
Erik La Prade has a B.A and an M.A. from City College. His first book, Things Maps Don't Show, was published in 1995, and his second, Figure Studies, was published in 1999. Some of his poems have appeared in Fish Drum, Night Magazine, The Hat, The Reading Room, The New York Times, and Artist and Influence. He also has articles and interviews in The Brooklyn Rail, Captured: A History of Film and Video On The Lower East Side, and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays.
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