Poetry. In the not-so-gentle hands of Dan Fante, this book of new poetry is more akin to surgery or the body shop than to the techniques of music and painting. Fante excises whole slices of life and lays them bare for us in inspect. Pain and self-mocking humor are the writer's tools here. He pries open and exposes his heart with the kindness of a hammer or crowbar. Indeed, what could be more ego-sizing than to have all pretense flattened, laying bare the raw self underneath? "Dan Fante allows us a glimpse of the Southern California demimonde that surely escaped his father's attention"--Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Author City: LOS ANGELES, CA USA

Dan Fante was raised in L.A. At twenty he hitchhiked to New York where he survived for over a decade on cheap whiskey, wrote thousands of unpublished poems, and failed at three suicide attempts. After getting sober, Fante returned to Los Angeles where he published his first novel in 1996. Today he lives in Venice, California with his tall wife Ayrin Leigh and a 2-year-old, blue-eyed son named Michelangelo Giovanni Fante.