Description
Fiction. Rob Cook's THE CHARNEL HOUSE ON JOYCE KILMER AVENUE presents the reader with an 'I' spectacularly divorced from the human race. Hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny, Cook's brilliant prose portrays the jinxed world of a college student making his meandering way through the larger more horrifying world. "The upstairs apartment, soft as a semester that demanded very little research, looked joyous the way it absorbed and flaunted the sunlight lurking on Joyce Kilmer Avenue."
"At first glance, New York poet Rob Cook's surreal prose might unnerve an unsuspecting reader. Cook has found a voice that is so precisely his own, new rhythms, new rhymes, that his world may appear foreign at first. Nothing could be further from the truth. LAST WINDOW IN THE PUNK HOTEL rants surreal but you'll find yourself tied to its purposes again and again. Cook's language is its own guide and shortly into reading LAST WINDOW IN THE PUNK HOTEL the reader finds themselves making the same leaps of faith as Cook, drawn into his intelligent will, a resident, if you will, at Cooks' Hotel."—Michael Dennis
"Eschewing neat closures, Cook creates poetry that arguably compose one long gesture, the sections open to and echoing each other, all held together by the pain of a unblinking awareness as well as by a ubiquitous freshness in the writing—if Cook sees a worn linguistic or perceptual path in front of him, he always veers off in a new direction that challenges both himself and his reader. Fueled by a deep dismay, the writing goes beyond Surrealism, for Breton's 'astonish me' is no longer sufficient; the many contemporary outrages of Cook's 'always lurking, indefinable country' require instead a poetic that can register the shock of 'castrated hymns' and 'the statues of sharks inside our mouths.'"—Philip Dacey
Author Bio
Rob Cook lives in New York City's East Village. He is the author of six collections, including THE CHARNEL HOUSE ON JOYCE KILMER AVENUE (Rain Mountain Press, 2018), ASKING MY LIVER FOR FORGIVENESS (Rain Mountain Press, 2015), Undermining of the Democratic Club (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), Blueprints for a Genocide (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012) and EMPIRE IN THE SHAPE OF A GRASS BLADE (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013). His recently re-released Last Window in the Punk Hotel was a Julie Suk Award finalist. Work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Caliban, Fence, A cappella Zoo, Zoland Poetry, Tampa Review, Minnesota Review, Aufgabe, Caketrain, Many Mountains Moving, Hampden- Sydney Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, BOMB, Sugar House Review, Mudfish, Pleiades, Versal, Weave, Wisconsin Review, Ur Vox, Heavy Feather Review, Phantom Drift, Osiris, etc.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA