Falling and other poems

by  Gary Percesepe

128 pages – published November 2013

paperback ISBN:  978-1-925101-24-9

ISBN:  978-1-925101-25-6   /   Kindle ISBN:  978-1-925101-26-3

to purchase, click here for  paperback  /  ePub  /  Amazon Kindle  /  B & N NOOKbook  /  Kobobooks  /  iBookstore

click here for a taste of falling and other poems

 

what people are saying about Falling and other poems

Gary Percesepe’s literary and film criticism is acute, his fiction startling, evocative, funny, and richly felt, and his poetry meditative and piercing. His political essays are compelling and right-minded, hard by truth to power, and always deserving. I cannot recommend his work highly enough. Everything he writes challenges us in the best possible way.

Frederick Barthelme

 

Gary Percesepe’s poetry seems straightforward but is as complex as flowers, as summer shade and layers of snowfall, available to all but folded around secrets only broken lovers or philosophers grasp, and contained by no borrowed forms but original truths and no meter but the throbs of a heart. He here assays breakfast making and love making and loss and memory and time and husbands and wives and offspring and always, always, the elegance of the line, the object plain or sublime or both, the landscapes of sex, sorrow and high style.

James Robison

 

Gary Percesepe drops you into an ambiguous world and pulls you back again, still reeling. He does it so deftly, you don’t even realize you’re bleeding until it’s over.

Heather Cox, author of California King

 

These poems are simultaneously street-smart and softly lyrical, and they sing the hard-edges of love’s brief rapture. From the cafés of Paris to the Nathan’s on Coney Island, Gary Percesepe announces himself as our 21st century O’Hara.

Kara Candito, author of Spectator and Taste of Cherry

 

Gary Percesepe’s new poetry collection engages, even overwhelms the senses. His poems form vivid, condensed worlds that are—as existence is—both visceral and meditative.

Jen Knox, author of Don’t Tease the Elephants

 

What is the sound of Gary Percesepe? It is the sound of “I want to feed you.” It is the sound of “I would follow you anywhere.” It is also the sound of “falling,” “tearing” and “speed.” And the sound of “at the back of the mind where we live now.” “The news from Brooklyn” resounds from “the tavern of planets,” but ultimately it is the sound of “writers in love.” It is this sound: “Your milk teeth say no, but I cannot remember a time we didn’t imagine that dress, hung in / Kant’s closet, a critique of judgment. You.” Buy this book. There’s heart and mind and music inside.

Bill Yarrow, author of Pointed Sentences

 

Gary Percesepe is absolutely at home writing the voice that fills the poems in falling, his latest book. It’s a collection of pieces, smoothed by conversation, an easy talk, both natural and telling – filled with rich tapestries of now. The book’s real gift is its range of imagery, a true presence that is immediate, inviting, and always sharp – “the wide sea / below amalfi” … “dirty streets of // saint germain-des–pres” … “cervantes’s windmill on fire again” … “lunches on red checked tablecloths in chelsea” … “the smell of the bakery in the / lemony light by the harbor” … “tracks in the black / winter night”. In falling, Percesepe, whose writing is alive and fresh, nudges, coerces, even pushes the reader to step through the pages into his world. And we do it. The writing is that good.

Sam Rasnake

 

From characters in summer suits in Paris, catfish from the Mississippi, baked ziti, the Hudson wearing white, chipped teeth, a single pearl earring, nail polish and frozen pianos, falling’s magic icebox spills secrets, joy and heartbreak. Gary Percesepe’s poems are unique and original, beautiful and lovely, like the curves of his Manhattan.

Kim Chinquee, author of Pretty and Oh Baby: Flash Fictions and Prose Poetry

 

 

find a review of itch and falling by Len Kuntz by clicking here, then scrolling down the page