Poetry. RUTHLESS, Jeff Mock's first collection, was chosen by Deborah Keenan as the winner of the Three Candles Press Open Book Award, and for good reason: it is a tour de force of style and substance. Through Mock's darkly comic "what if" verse, we are given escapades of a risen Lazarus, adventures of The Brothers Grimm in Hollywood, and self-portraits ranging from a noxious weed to Miss America. His poems are unsparing and brutal, yet deftly written, humorous, and in the end, they offer slices of life from the full range of human experience. Mock's is a book of dreams and vignettes, danger and passion, self-aggrandizement and -deprecation. "Life is good," Mock writes in "Self Portrait Running With Scissors." Yes, it is good; we know it is. As Alan Michael Parker writes, it is "A book of splendid insurrections—of rebellion and revivification—Jeff Mock's Ruthless haunts us gleefully, with poems that read on even when the lights are off." It is a book of satisfying rewards.
Author City: NEW HAVEN, CT USA
Jeff Mock was born in Sarpy County, Nebraska. He received an MFA from The University of Alabama, where he was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and Editor of Black Warrior Review. He served as Assistant Editor of The Gettysburg Review for seven years before joining the faculty of Southern Connecticut State University. He is the author of a chapbook, Evening Travelers (Volans Press, 1994), and a guidebook for beginning writers, You Can Write Poetry (Writer's Digest Books, 1998). His poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Connecticut Review, Crazyhorse, DENVER QUARTERLY, The Georgia Review, The Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, The North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Margot Schilpp, and their daughters, Paula and Leah.
"In addition to its craftsmanship, intelligence, and humanity, RUTHLESS is work of amazing scope. From Lazarus to Hansel and Gretel to the author’s self portrait as noxious weed, from villanelle to free verse, from epistemology to ontology, from tragedy to comedy, Jeff Mock takes us on a dazzling journey through this animate and manifold landscape, where autumn whispers, '... this/ Won’t last, be careless,/Be reckless, believe in the beautiful/Lie, adore and abandon.'"
—William Trowbridge, author of Enter Dark Stranger and The Complete Book of Kong
"Jeff Mock’s collection RUTHLESS is just that—ruthless in its precise and incisive vision of our off-kilter world, cutting through the shams of language and thought to arrive at hard-won humor that makes his readers see his—and their—foibles all the more clearly. But before you write this collection off as a mere antidote to cynicism, please note that there is tenderness here, too, and beauty—shimmering through such poems as 'Hummingbird' and 'Lazarus's Bed.' So many first books of poems stay within a slight and expected range of thought, language and image, but Mock's not afraid to take on anything or anyone. His 'ruthless' poems are archly invigorating, persuasively intelligent, and addictively readable."
—Allison Joseph, author of What Keeps Us Here and My Father’s Kites
"A book of splendid insurrections—of rebellion and revivification—Jeff Mock's RUTHLESS haunts us gleefully, with poems that read on even when the lights are off. Here loom the jaunty haints at the margins of the Self, the folks seen side-long, self-portraits in iambs and smoke. Whether letting Lazarus speak up at last, and then again, or preening for us in heels and a tiara, Mock knows more and he’s telling. RUTHLESS belongs in every library—or better yet, on every bedside table."
—Alan Michael Parker, author of Elephants & Butterflies
"The poems in Jeff Mock’s book erupt from an imagination where everything seems possible: a host of international terrorists sit down together for a black-tie dinner—after first unpacking their semiautomatics, natch; the biblical Lazarus emerges as a low-life car-snatcher; the poet himself morphs into Miss America, tiara slipping 'from crew cut to forehead,' Burt Parks booming 'There he goes….' in the background. The poems are taut, honed, as well-wrought as any reader could wish—I don’t believe the book contains a spare comma. But scratch the surface of this darkly comic collection and you’ll find a consciousness that is generous, and skeptical, and ever-ready to wade into the conundra that besiege us moderns, all expressed in the kind of razor-sharp observation and limber phrasing that leaves the reader reading RUTHLESS, breathless. Once begun, the poems in Jeff Mock’s fine book won’t take you off the hook, and you’ll be happily tethered."
—Clare Rossini, author of Lingo