Exterminating Angels

Taking its title from the quietly weird and great Luis Bunuel film, Alan's Catlin's latest collection provides his trademark tour of the hardcore and desperate lives of drug users, alcoholics living on the dark side in the mean streets and their meaner heads. Drawing on his years as a bartender in a less than elegant establishment, Catlin is the poet laureate of the down and out, depicting with great brio the world of the terminally vicious, the mortally wounded in heart and soul. Saving his readers from a case of fatal depression is Catlin's marvelous turn of a phrase, like "he appeared to be in his/late forties going on dead" and "Madonna of the meth lab." This is a wonderful poetry collection, the perfect antidote to a Hallmark Christmas movie.

-Robert Cooperman, author of Reefer Madness and Go Play Outside



Channeling cinematic depictions of reality from scifi classics like Killer Klowns from Outer Space to Tarantino and Bunuel, Alan Catlin artfully shows us the underbelly of The American Dream. The glamour of the bar, the juke joint, the dive, is revealed as nothing but seedy and sad, like the wasted lives of so many of the protagonists of these poems whose ironic titles of famous films reinforce the illusions of charm and enchantment that drive so many to disillusionment and despair. Catlin strips away the mirage of the banquet and, like Burroughs, shows us the piece of meat quivering on the end of the fork.

-Charles Rammelkamp, author of Ugler Lee and The Field of Happiness



This collection is like a sharp, stainless-steel blade and gives the reader a taste of an America we might have seen through a Philip Marlowe's eyes. It's a powerful ride, in fact it's more like a rollercoaster. I couldn't get quickly enough to the next poem and read it like a private-eye novel and thought more than once of Edward Hopper scenes. Catlin has produced a masterpiece writing with a fury from an angry and disappointed love for America.

-Rose Mary Boehm, author of The Rain Girl (Chaffinch Press, Ireland)