It was a privilege to wrrite the intro to Joe DePatta’s debut poetry collection: SallyGray is Gone. Coming soon from CSF Publishing.
Sally Gray is gone. Four words amounting to an irrefutable statement, a hard fact. Four words that come on as a whisper, or as a torrent, and carry within them the seeds for a hymn and homage, a dirge and dream-life deferred. It is the echo of this name, and the eclipsed reality to which it corresponds, that serves as the heartbeat and spiritual backbone of Joe De Patta’s debut poetry collection.
Enter a house of fractured mirrors, where multiple reflections cast and assert their dueling perspectives: From a hard-boiled clown with street cred, to a rock drummer idling in the gutter while looking up at the stars, to a husband and lover mourning the death of his wife and best friend, De Patta, in an insular world of lost and found, reconciles playthings with ruins, and small hours with eternity. This lyrical task is carried out with humor, zest, bite, snarl, outrage and zeal, and ultimately, with a heart laid bare at the crossroads of named longing.
