βHere it is, my slow-cooked collection of squalid and haunted poems about what is so far the worst period of my life: the end of a manic mismarriage and its aftermath, when, having just turned 30, I finally ended up alone with myself, with time to think about who I was and why Iβd landed there. But although this book is a scream of pain, it is one with elaborate stylings and fully-realized rooms; it is an ornate palace of wailing, a metropolis of painstakingly articulated discombobulation whose acerbic bitterness flows over and leaps up into a flight of creation, a limber hymn to making something that doesnβt exist, to putting into gilded words that which is here so briefly and soon will be goneβmyself. But thereβs also the laughter, if somewhat mocking, that rings through the halls of the stanzas, for in the end, I have always thawed my frozen soul with the scorching jewel of art, the merry fire of the good line, the phrasing that somersaults and lands on its hands, burning right.
Who should read this? Dusty people, perhaps. Twilight people, dawn bats, elephants in musth, road signs in the middle of the desert, people who walk their dogs alone on Friday night, unemployed executioners, cynical kittens, bored gods, those who gambled their lives and lost, winners whose winnings mean nothing, headless presidents, everyone who is meatless, boneless, and fleshless, everyone ingrown and outgrown and overgrown and undergrown. Everybody whoβs me and the hundreds that are you. I rate this book four out of five full moons and nine out of ten grenades. I should be selling it for trillions of dollars and vials of blood from the beautiful and youngβbut I feel generous today, so Iβll give it to you for free. Arenβt I kind?β