The Gone Artists

While reading this delightful collection, I thought of the old Beat epithet, “gone.” Artists may come and go, but the best stay gone. So it is with the groovily gone poems in this chapbook, at once witty and poignant, sensual and fractal, while admirably economical. These poems reveal how “everything is velcroed / to each other thing”; how once “the illustrious ancestors” of gnats were “the scourge – of dinosaurs”; how in order to bake an apple pie you must first create “the milky way / so there will be butter .  . . and dragons, / so there will be fire”; how “every day another disappears / this singer / this poet /this actor / that friend”; how memory confronts us with “a conveyor belt /of morphing /and unmorphing / returnees.” This is a gone collection you will wish to return to often. — John Roche, author of Topicalities, On Conesus, and The Joe Poems.