Monday, September 24, 2007
BURT KIMMELMAN “INTRODUCES” EILEEN TABIOS
As you can see by the brand-new photos at our Marsh Hawk Press web site, a good time was had by all during the readings and launch for our Fall 2007 books! We now are delighted to share the introductions to these books written and presented by Burt Kimmelman, and hope they encourage you to check out our new releases:
Fall Book Launch Introduction:
The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes by Eileen Tabios:
Eileen Tabios is a genre-exploding, subversive, transgressive, superbly intelligent writer who I think thrives on the idea of hybridity. Indeed, not simply in her latest book, The Light Sang as It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography, but in earlier work too, she can be intent on blurring the lines between art and the everyday, not unlike, for me, the emblematic metaphor in William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch; Eileen shows us, she fixes in sharp focus, the food on the tip of one’s fork. I can think of two other antecedents or co-workers, who have published, with considerable effect, work that implicitly interrogates art and accuses it of being some pristine, showcased construct. The earlier work is Robert Creeley’s Day Book of a Virtual Poet, which records Creeley’s responses to a group of high school students in Buffalo who participated in a City Honors Online Writing Program Discussion List in the mid 90s, which Creeley found to be very nurturing and inventive. What became clear in this book is that a new genre of literature was being created. And earlier this year Nick Piombino published Fait Accompli, which is simply selections from his blogs over the last few years. But what Eileen has done goes well beyond this. She has made selections from blogs and has juxtaposed them with other writings of all kinds; they look different in the light of the various adjacencies, and they are at times shaped, bent—while they still retain their integrity as blogs—or are they poems in their own right? Written under the sign of her father’s passing, this remarkable book is also a kind of history of a colonized Philippines, of Eileen’s family, and of herself. It is only natural that she would write a book that in fact recasts history and historiography, a book written in English rather than a native language, a book written by someone who in her youth was uprooted from her home and taken to the United States where she makes her home. There are no absolutes, I think, in the vision of this book, in the writing of this book, and appropriately everything is up for grabs in it. In a poem she titles “Me … Me,” and which is subtitled “Memry,” spelled M E M R Y, she lists thirteen ways she has written in her life other than as a poet, and then says, simply: “Words have always been my material. // But I have yet to figure out how to spell that which remembering preserves.”
As you can see by the brand-new photos at our Marsh Hawk Press web site, a good time was had by all during the readings and launch for our Fall 2007 books! We now are delighted to share the introductions to these books written and presented by Burt Kimmelman, and hope they encourage you to check out our new releases:
Fall Book Launch Introduction:
The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes by Eileen Tabios:
Eileen Tabios is a genre-exploding, subversive, transgressive, superbly intelligent writer who I think thrives on the idea of hybridity. Indeed, not simply in her latest book, The Light Sang as It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography, but in earlier work too, she can be intent on blurring the lines between art and the everyday, not unlike, for me, the emblematic metaphor in William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch; Eileen shows us, she fixes in sharp focus, the food on the tip of one’s fork. I can think of two other antecedents or co-workers, who have published, with considerable effect, work that implicitly interrogates art and accuses it of being some pristine, showcased construct. The earlier work is Robert Creeley’s Day Book of a Virtual Poet, which records Creeley’s responses to a group of high school students in Buffalo who participated in a City Honors Online Writing Program Discussion List in the mid 90s, which Creeley found to be very nurturing and inventive. What became clear in this book is that a new genre of literature was being created. And earlier this year Nick Piombino published Fait Accompli, which is simply selections from his blogs over the last few years. But what Eileen has done goes well beyond this. She has made selections from blogs and has juxtaposed them with other writings of all kinds; they look different in the light of the various adjacencies, and they are at times shaped, bent—while they still retain their integrity as blogs—or are they poems in their own right? Written under the sign of her father’s passing, this remarkable book is also a kind of history of a colonized Philippines, of Eileen’s family, and of herself. It is only natural that she would write a book that in fact recasts history and historiography, a book written in English rather than a native language, a book written by someone who in her youth was uprooted from her home and taken to the United States where she makes her home. There are no absolutes, I think, in the vision of this book, in the writing of this book, and appropriately everything is up for grabs in it. In a poem she titles “Me … Me,” and which is subtitled “Memry,” spelled M E M R Y, she lists thirteen ways she has written in her life other than as a poet, and then says, simply: “Words have always been my material. // But I have yet to figure out how to spell that which remembering preserves.”
BURT KIMMELMAN “INTRODUCES” SANDY MCINTOSH
As you can see by the brand-new photos at our Marsh Hawk Press web site, a good time was had by all during the readings and launch for our Fall 2007 books! We now are delighted to share the introductions to these books written and presented by Burt Kimmelman, and hope they encourage you to check out our new releases:
Fall Book Launch Introduction:
Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh
Sandy McIntosh’s latest book, Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death, continues in a vein he has mined in previous books to painfully funny and disturbing effect. When I read Sandy’s work I feel I am dancing with characters in a wild abandon I would otherwise never have permitted myself, characters that have come from my own psychic depths, who dance with me in a hall of distorted mirrors. Sandy’s work, which is extraordinarily inventive, is uniquely his own—and yet reading it I am reminded of reading someone like Borges or Auster, maybe to a lesser extent Billy Collins--but no one else has so amusingly plumbed our unconscious and the melding of dream and reality as has Sandy; his forays into human experience are painful at times, hilariously bizarre, always poignant as well as provocative, and unique in their formal qualities. His is a Möbius strip world in which we become aware of our primal fears and wishes through the oddnesses of an everyday consciousness tinged with ironic goofiness. Consider Number Four in The Catalogue of Prohibited Musical Instruments; the poem, titled “The Musical Scaffold,” begins thusly:
As you can see by the brand-new photos at our Marsh Hawk Press web site, a good time was had by all during the readings and launch for our Fall 2007 books! We now are delighted to share the introductions to these books written and presented by Burt Kimmelman, and hope they encourage you to check out our new releases:
Fall Book Launch Introduction:
Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh
Sandy McIntosh’s latest book, Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death, continues in a vein he has mined in previous books to painfully funny and disturbing effect. When I read Sandy’s work I feel I am dancing with characters in a wild abandon I would otherwise never have permitted myself, characters that have come from my own psychic depths, who dance with me in a hall of distorted mirrors. Sandy’s work, which is extraordinarily inventive, is uniquely his own—and yet reading it I am reminded of reading someone like Borges or Auster, maybe to a lesser extent Billy Collins--but no one else has so amusingly plumbed our unconscious and the melding of dream and reality as has Sandy; his forays into human experience are painful at times, hilariously bizarre, always poignant as well as provocative, and unique in their formal qualities. His is a Möbius strip world in which we become aware of our primal fears and wishes through the oddnesses of an everyday consciousness tinged with ironic goofiness. Consider Number Four in The Catalogue of Prohibited Musical Instruments; the poem, titled “The Musical Scaffold,” begins thusly:
Before inventing
the electric chair
Thomas Edison
proposed
a moral cautionary
for mass executions:
the condemned
would be hanged
from ropes
braided of metal
instead of hemp.
Each would be tuned
to a different
note, and,
as bodies
dropped through
trapdoors
in sequence,
a solemn musical
composition
would sound.
BURT KIMMELMAN "INTRODUCES" NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
As you can see by the brand-new photos at our Marsh Hawk Press web site, a good time was had by all during the readings and launch for our Fall 2007 books! We now are delighted to share the introductions to these books written and presented by Burt Kimmelman, and hope they encourage you to check out our new releases:
Fall Book Launch Introduction:
Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein’s moving meditation on Judaism and his life as a Jew living in America, Passing Over, serves as a key counterpoint to a later work titled Track, three book-length poems in a sequence, which at its deepest level, to my mind, involves itself in considering the phenomenon of the literate human being and the possibility for spiritual sustenance. It incorporates Judaic scriptural motifs among allusions to and quotes from other textual religious and literary traditions. What Passing Over does is to establish an intellectual grounding for the later work and to flesh out the importance of Judaism for Norman the poet as well as Norman who is Jewish-American, post holocaust, and to offer possibilities of reading Track, possibilities not on the surface of the poem. As well, Passing Over is an extension of Norman’s first, early book, Restless Messengers, which also lyrically explored Jewish identity and life. What I am most struck with in this later volume on Judaism, one written by a mature poet, is a finely seasoned, calm, clear-eyed moral clarity, which is imparted with deftness, for example in his poem “Allegory of the Song “ that begins with what I imagine is an allusion to Walter Benjamin’s thwarted escape from the Nazis, leading to his suicide, but also with echoes of Kafka:
Annihilation should not disturb anyone’s comfort except that the song perishes, and this death cannot ever be fully comprehended. The last stanza begins,
As you can see by the brand-new photos at our Marsh Hawk Press web site, a good time was had by all during the readings and launch for our Fall 2007 books! We now are delighted to share the introductions to these books written and presented by Burt Kimmelman, and hope they encourage you to check out our new releases:
Fall Book Launch Introduction:
Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein
Norman Finkelstein’s moving meditation on Judaism and his life as a Jew living in America, Passing Over, serves as a key counterpoint to a later work titled Track, three book-length poems in a sequence, which at its deepest level, to my mind, involves itself in considering the phenomenon of the literate human being and the possibility for spiritual sustenance. It incorporates Judaic scriptural motifs among allusions to and quotes from other textual religious and literary traditions. What Passing Over does is to establish an intellectual grounding for the later work and to flesh out the importance of Judaism for Norman the poet as well as Norman who is Jewish-American, post holocaust, and to offer possibilities of reading Track, possibilities not on the surface of the poem. As well, Passing Over is an extension of Norman’s first, early book, Restless Messengers, which also lyrically explored Jewish identity and life. What I am most struck with in this later volume on Judaism, one written by a mature poet, is a finely seasoned, calm, clear-eyed moral clarity, which is imparted with deftness, for example in his poem “Allegory of the Song “ that begins with what I imagine is an allusion to Walter Benjamin’s thwarted escape from the Nazis, leading to his suicide, but also with echoes of Kafka:
At the disputed border the song is turned back.
Denied a visa, without proper ID,
the stateless one, begging and bluffin,
is last seen with what little it owns,
slumped on a bench outside a station
in an unidentified jurisdiction.
The stationmaster, the borderguard,
the clerk at district headquarters,
claim that they dealt with no such figure
on that particular date.
Annihilation should not disturb anyone’s comfort except that the song perishes, and this death cannot ever be fully comprehended. The last stanza begins,
Think nothing of it: I was fighting off sleep
when I came upon the scene.
I never heard what became of it,
but it is allegory because it must be allegory,
and the losses were tallied long ago.
Let’s climb up into the hills, away from the square
where the drivers beside their trucks blow on their hands
against an early frost.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
MARSH HAWK PRESS LAUNCHES FALL AUTHORS THIS WEEK!
And the public is invited!
Two events in New York City celebrate Marsh Hawk Press' Fall Releases:
Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein
Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh
The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes by Eileen R. Tabios
1)
Poetry Reading
DATE: Sept. 19, 2007
TIME: starting at 6 p.m.
LOCATION: Cornelia Street, 29 Cornelia Street, NYC 10014, 212-989-9319
Cover $7 (includes one drink)
Sharon Olinka hosts 3 Poets: Norman Finkelstein; Sandy McIntosh; Eileen Tabios
2)
Official Book Launch Party & Book Signing at Poets House
DATE: September 20, 2007
TIME: 7:00-9:00 pm
LOCATION: Poets House, 72 Spring Street, Second Floor, New York, N.Y. 10012. (212) 431-7920
Hear our featured poets, Norman Finkelstein, Sandy McIntosh and Eileen R. Tabios read. Wine, cheese and other good things will be served. (All free, of course). This is a wonderful opportunity to socialize with outstanding poets from NYC and around the country. Authors will be happy to sign books.
Marsh Hawk Press is also offering a Special Launch Price of 40% off the books' retail prices if you wish to acquire all three Fall books, as well as selected discounts on individual books.
And the public is invited!
Two events in New York City celebrate Marsh Hawk Press' Fall Releases:
Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein
Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh
The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes by Eileen R. Tabios
1)
Poetry Reading
DATE: Sept. 19, 2007
TIME: starting at 6 p.m.
LOCATION: Cornelia Street, 29 Cornelia Street, NYC 10014, 212-989-9319
Cover $7 (includes one drink)
Sharon Olinka hosts 3 Poets: Norman Finkelstein; Sandy McIntosh; Eileen Tabios
2)
Official Book Launch Party & Book Signing at Poets House
DATE: September 20, 2007
TIME: 7:00-9:00 pm
LOCATION: Poets House, 72 Spring Street, Second Floor, New York, N.Y. 10012. (212) 431-7920
Hear our featured poets, Norman Finkelstein, Sandy McIntosh and Eileen R. Tabios read. Wine, cheese and other good things will be served. (All free, of course). This is a wonderful opportunity to socialize with outstanding poets from NYC and around the country. Authors will be happy to sign books.
Marsh Hawk Press is also offering a Special Launch Price of 40% off the books' retail prices if you wish to acquire all three Fall books, as well as selected discounts on individual books.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN REVIEWED
Norman Finkelstein's Passing Over is reviewed in Midwest Book Review's Small Press Bookwatch, September Issue, with:
Norman Finkelstein's Passing Over is reviewed in Midwest Book Review's Small Press Bookwatch, September Issue, with:
Professor of English Norman Finkelstein presents Passing Over, an anthology of free-verse poetry. Originally written in the late 80's and early 90's, Passing Over deals with both religious and secular views of the Jewish tradition, and the parable of Passover. A deeply contemplative meditation upon the connections between faith and early life, heavenly and human worlds. "Passing Over": Neither remembered nor forgotten / but remembered and forgotten / with an uncanny simultaneity, / an image chosen at random / from the constant course of a life / or an image smuggled in, / stolen from the life of another, / takes on an inordinate weight, / an illegitimate density, / frustratingly conditional / in the context of a poem / that claims nothing for itself / and everything for the image / it is compelled to withhold.
STEPHEN PAUL MILLER REVIEWED IN THE NEW BROOKLYN RAIL!
Stephen Paul Miller's Skinny Eighth Avenue is reviewed by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright in Brooklyn Rail; click on excerpt below for the whole review:
Stephen Paul Miller's Skinny Eighth Avenue is reviewed by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright in Brooklyn Rail; click on excerpt below for the whole review:
Contemporary culture, especially politics, is embraced. George Bush is a major protagonist. In play-like scenarios we’re introduced to John Gotti, Marilyn Monroe and Van McCoy who wrote “The Hustle.” Like Pound and Ginsberg, Miller takes on the real world, leavening it with surrealist tropes and disarming asides.
CONGRATULATIONS TO MARY MACKEY
whose title poem from her book Breaking The Fever has been posted to the Nevada County Arts Council's Women's Writing Salon. The poem, illustrated by an image of mikweed pods in winter, is available at: http://www.nevadacountyartscouncil.org/womenswriting/salon.html
whose title poem from her book Breaking The Fever has been posted to the Nevada County Arts Council's Women's Writing Salon. The poem, illustrated by an image of mikweed pods in winter, is available at: http://www.nevadacountyartscouncil.org/womenswriting/salon.html
Saturday, September 08, 2007
YOU ARE INVITED TO EVENTS LAUNCHING MARSH HAWK PRESS' FALL AUTHORS!
Two events in New York City celebrate Marsh Hawk Press' Fall Releases:
Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein
Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh
The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes by Eileen R. Tabios
1)
Poetry Reading
DATE: Sept. 19, 2007
TIME: starting at 6 p.m.
LOCATION: Cornelia Street, 29 Cornelia Street, NYC 10014, 212-989-9319
Cover $7 (includes one drink)
Rochelle Ratner hosts 3 Poets: Norman Finkelstein; Sandy McIntosh; Eileen Tabios
2)
Official Book Launch Party & Book Signing at Poets House
DATE: September 20, 2007
TIME: 7:00-9:00 pm
LOCATION: Poets House, 72 Spring Street, Second Floor, New York, N.Y. 10012. (212) 431-7920
Hear our featured poets, Norman Finkelstein, Sandy McIntosh and Eileen R. Tabios read. Wine, cheese and other good things will be served. (All free, of course). This is a wonderful opportunity to socialize with outstanding poets from NYC and around the country. Authors will be happy to sign books.
Marsh Hawk Press is also offering a Special Launch Price of 40% off the books' retail prices if you wish to acquire all three Fall books.
Two events in New York City celebrate Marsh Hawk Press' Fall Releases:
Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein
Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh
The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes by Eileen R. Tabios
1)
Poetry Reading
DATE: Sept. 19, 2007
TIME: starting at 6 p.m.
LOCATION: Cornelia Street, 29 Cornelia Street, NYC 10014, 212-989-9319
Cover $7 (includes one drink)
Rochelle Ratner hosts 3 Poets: Norman Finkelstein; Sandy McIntosh; Eileen Tabios
2)
Official Book Launch Party & Book Signing at Poets House
DATE: September 20, 2007
TIME: 7:00-9:00 pm
LOCATION: Poets House, 72 Spring Street, Second Floor, New York, N.Y. 10012. (212) 431-7920
Hear our featured poets, Norman Finkelstein, Sandy McIntosh and Eileen R. Tabios read. Wine, cheese and other good things will be served. (All free, of course). This is a wonderful opportunity to socialize with outstanding poets from NYC and around the country. Authors will be happy to sign books.
Marsh Hawk Press is also offering a Special Launch Price of 40% off the books' retail prices if you wish to acquire all three Fall books.
THE LIGHT BEGINS TO SING THROUGHOUT THE BLOGOSPHERE!
It seems fitting that Eileen Tabios' new book The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes has started to receive wonderful comments throughout the blogosphere....since Eileen's book is tied so closely to blogging. Here are some sample early reactions from various poet-bloggers:
From Jean Vengua's Okir Blog:
"Just received Eileen Tabios’ new poetry book, The Light Sang as it Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography. And I have just begun reading it. I think it’s one of her best ever. But as I said to a friend, I want to post about it, but her work is so often (especially in this book) so multiple, autobiographical, lyrical, hard-nosed, collaborative, daring, funny and challenging, heartbreaking and thoughtful — I don’t know where to begin, honestly. I always feel like I have to start in a little corner, and hope that others can extrapolate from that. Here’s a tiny little piece, a title: “Why President Bush Owes Me $63.00? Now if that doesn’t make you go out and buy the book…"
***
From Karri Kokko commenting on Okir:
"Just leafing through it you can sense it’s a master work, a Book of the Dead about Life, if you will."
***
From Ernesto Priego's Never Neutral Blog:
The Light Sings
September 3rd, 2007
Today the postman
brought me The Light:
it is not
about beginnings
or endings,
but about
the very intercourse of daily life;
a book of songs sang
not by a lonely singer,
but by a hospitable rápsoda,
illuminated & enlightened
who knows poetry
is in fact the house of beings.
As you probably know or heard before
The light can almost be blinding in its beauty.
***
From Jessica Smith's LookTouch Blog:
Jessica hadn't yet read the book when she blogged about it, but said in praise of book designer Claudia Carlson's work: "Eileen Tabios's new book. It's called The Light Sang as it Left Your Eyes and hot damn that's some nice cover design."
***
From Allen Bramhall's Tributary :
"I am inspired to write a few Tabiosian words, generalities upon the phenomenon. Eileen has invented, I here declare, a new genre, which might be called Gallimaufry, or, perhaps, And The Kitchen Sink. I chose those terms for their sense of inclusion and variety. like her previous brick, I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved (Marsh Hawk), Eileen utilizes stylistic variety: prose, hay(na)ku, collaboration, etc. I like how process is so close to the surface. and she does not divorce her blog writing and connections from her poetry. which, too, proposes process as a central energy of the work. that how the poem and book arrived to its life is as important as what its life 'is'. this is consistent with the poets who interest me. I don't mean in the sense of I went to Yaddo and breathed the free air sort of processual undertaking. I mean Eileen lets ideas happen, gives them free rein in the composition. Eileen's gestures around 'the subject' form a space that is the subject. all this is evident by early fresh glances. I look forward to digging in in earnest.
It seems fitting that Eileen Tabios' new book The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes has started to receive wonderful comments throughout the blogosphere....since Eileen's book is tied so closely to blogging. Here are some sample early reactions from various poet-bloggers:
From Jean Vengua's Okir Blog:
"Just received Eileen Tabios’ new poetry book, The Light Sang as it Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography. And I have just begun reading it. I think it’s one of her best ever. But as I said to a friend, I want to post about it, but her work is so often (especially in this book) so multiple, autobiographical, lyrical, hard-nosed, collaborative, daring, funny and challenging, heartbreaking and thoughtful — I don’t know where to begin, honestly. I always feel like I have to start in a little corner, and hope that others can extrapolate from that. Here’s a tiny little piece, a title: “Why President Bush Owes Me $63.00? Now if that doesn’t make you go out and buy the book…"
***
From Karri Kokko commenting on Okir:
"Just leafing through it you can sense it’s a master work, a Book of the Dead about Life, if you will."
***
From Ernesto Priego's Never Neutral Blog:
The Light Sings
September 3rd, 2007
Today the postman
brought me The Light:
it is not
about beginnings
or endings,
but about
the very intercourse of daily life;
a book of songs sang
not by a lonely singer,
but by a hospitable rápsoda,
illuminated & enlightened
who knows poetry
is in fact the house of beings.
As you probably know or heard before
The light can almost be blinding in its beauty.
***
From Jessica Smith's LookTouch Blog:
Jessica hadn't yet read the book when she blogged about it, but said in praise of book designer Claudia Carlson's work: "Eileen Tabios's new book. It's called The Light Sang as it Left Your Eyes and hot damn that's some nice cover design."
***
From Allen Bramhall's Tributary :
"I am inspired to write a few Tabiosian words, generalities upon the phenomenon. Eileen has invented, I here declare, a new genre, which might be called Gallimaufry, or, perhaps, And The Kitchen Sink. I chose those terms for their sense of inclusion and variety. like her previous brick, I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved (Marsh Hawk), Eileen utilizes stylistic variety: prose, hay(na)ku, collaboration, etc. I like how process is so close to the surface. and she does not divorce her blog writing and connections from her poetry. which, too, proposes process as a central energy of the work. that how the poem and book arrived to its life is as important as what its life 'is'. this is consistent with the poets who interest me. I don't mean in the sense of I went to Yaddo and breathed the free air sort of processual undertaking. I mean Eileen lets ideas happen, gives them free rein in the composition. Eileen's gestures around 'the subject' form a space that is the subject. all this is evident by early fresh glances. I look forward to digging in in earnest.
NEW STEVE FELLNER REVIEW
Rigoberto Gonzalez' post at the Poetry Foundation Blog entitled "Play It Again, Sam, On Poetry Reviewing" mentions Steve Fellner's BLIND DATE WITH CAVAFY, in part applauding Claudia Carlson's wonderful design of the book. Mr. Gonzalez also recently reviewed BLIND DATE WITH CAVAFY; click on excerpt below for the full review:
Rigoberto Gonzalez' post at the Poetry Foundation Blog entitled "Play It Again, Sam, On Poetry Reviewing" mentions Steve Fellner's BLIND DATE WITH CAVAFY, in part applauding Claudia Carlson's wonderful design of the book. Mr. Gonzalez also recently reviewed BLIND DATE WITH CAVAFY; click on excerpt below for the full review:
Fellner’s deadpan delivery disarms the reader (The poem “Judgment Day” opens matter-of-factly with “The line is long.”), but he never fails to reel the true sentiment of his poems back in. And by the end of the book, though even the funnier lines don’t seem as funny anymore because the pain underneath has surfaced fully, the reader will come to appreciate and trust this “funny man” as the compelling teller of the hard personal truths
