Toothsome

Each of Toothsome's evocative poems compels us to read more. Whether couched in the history of Antinous or a personal legend of a wolf-stalker, these vibrant, allusive, and finely hewn verses take us inside the speaker's "secret doors to fens and moors" to discover truths "locked inside the moon/and the sky's bright organs." Here, you will find yourself in a retirement home for the gods or watching a child indiscriminately amputate the limbs of a chocolate bunny. Art Zilleruelo's Toothsome is a message in a bottle. The only thing that surpasses the appeal of setting a message adrift on the sea is being the reader on the opposite shore.

-Eileen Cleary, Carve Magazine

In "Toothsome," Art Zilleruelo's new and stunning collection, prophetic voices and circumstances provide, in starkly human terms, a wisdom and sorrow rooted in the landscapes of Bloomsburg, Ashland, and the Pennsylvania coal country surrounding Glen Burn Colliery. The haunting lyricism in this collection rises from deep underground to erupt in a controlled rage against our political, economic, and personal tragedies and weaknesses. These are deeply felt, wide-awake poems worthy of your attention.

- Rick Mulkey, author of Ravenous: New & Selected Poems (Serving House Press, 2014), Director of the Creative Writing Program at Converse College.

Exquisitely detailed and privately apocalyptic, every one of these pieces. Zilleruelo hunts through the cellular tangles of our word world to gut and skin and repurpose the human voice, reanimating it as more feral, more hopeful, releasing it then into fresh intersections of land, love, faith, and forgiveness--Toothsome grants the sort of ineffable reconciliation that only the most masterful poetry can supply.



--Nate Liederba