Brendan Constantine Is My Kind of Town

Rick is a poet with a real genius for the subtle ironic humor of absurd situations. He holds all the wild cards. He even violates the rules of agreement in the next to last line of Freeway of Love - to underline the aesthetic paradox of "relationship" in a universe of radical solpsism. And that is truly surreal. People are travelling everywhere in this book: Chicago, San Francisco, Istanbul. But the best trip of all is the fishing poem: an hallucinatory plunge into the chthonic troustream of the imagination. If you're already a Rick Lupert fan, you've got to have this book: you can't possibly live without it. If you're not yet familiar with his work, buy it, read it, and fall in love. You'll soon find yourself stalking him outside of the Poetry Super Highway studios just to get a fleeting glimpse of his shadow. You'll send him emails, begging to take care of the cat while he goes on vacation. Etc. This is a classic. Pat Cohee, September 2001