It’s tough to always be in love with a ghost. It’s also easy. The living don’t stand a chance against ghosts. In loving ghosts there are no real complications, no real disappointments, no real anything. There’s lots of teething on absence. Lots of wrestling with thin haunted air. Loving a ghost is like having some incorruptible tryst in a dream state.
Excerpt from No Man’s Brooklyn
Coming soon from CSF Publishing
Photo by Anthony Distefano
I could feel the music of a slow future dying inside me. And the past very much alive, like shimmering beatific flowers, like luscious night thistles. The past is a changeable feast. Except it is a feast that eats and eats and eats. It consumes more than it yields.
Excerpt from No Man’s Brooklyn
Coming soon from CSF Publishing
Photo by Anthony Distefano
Remember when we were kids and we’d sometimes have sleepovers and listen to the dark together? That’s what you called it Anya. Listening to the dark.
And it was because of you Anya that I started naming different types of dark, listing them. Warm-dark, cave-dark, void-dark, womb-dark, sleep-dark, Eros-dark, blank-dark, siege-dark. And then there’s that anonymous dark that gets inside your head and behind your eyes and coils around your lungs and constricts your breathing. There is also curse-dark, which casts a prolonged spell, a pall. And then there’s lonely, but naming it doesn’t help. Not in the same way.
Excerpt from No Man’s Brooklyn
Coming soon from CSF Publishing
Photo by Anthony Distefano
Anya, I long to reach you only because I know that you are unreachable. It keeps my longing in a chrysalis state, a cocoon state. Nothing ever grows. It simply hums and palpitates and aspires toward growth. It is the shadow twin of growth.
Excerpt from No Man’s Brooklyn
Coming soon from CSF Publishing
Cover reveal for my fourth novel.
Coming soon from CSF Publishing.
Back cover image for my new novel, No Man’s Brooklyn.
Coming soon from CSF Publishing.
Photos by Anthony Distefano.
Short video trailer, shot in Brooklyn, promoting the upcoming release of my fourth novel.
NO MAN’S BROOKLYN
From the valentine boneyards of working-class Brooklyn, comes a tale of first love, lost innocence, tragedy, and healing. Daniel Trovato, having left his native Bensonhurst years ago to start a new life in L.A., is recently sober and enjoying cult success through his Sworn Witness series of graphic novels. When he receives word that his childhood love, Anya, has died from an overdose, he is compelled to return to the “old neighborhood.” It is there that he will walk through the ghostly twilight of an unfinished past, and revisit both the romantic lore and shadow-life of his youth. The enduring torch he’s carried for Anya, “the girl from nowhere,” who was found in a trashcan and adopted by a Russian family; the hazy circumstances of his mother’s suicide when he was fourteen; glacial estrangement from his father; the street-and-concrete beats and rhythms of an urban boyhood. Ultimately, No Man’s Brooklyn is about the mythic journey we take to meet our core self, and a lyrical testament to the words of Dylan Thomas: “The memories of childhood have no order, and no end.”
Slick astronomy,
moonlight drips between her thighs–
The lay of space, mine.
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.
An excerpt of my review of Yelena Moskovich’s scintillating third novel: A Door Behind A Door. Moskovich is one of my contemporary favorites, a bold and daring stylist who extends the frontiers of language and vision.
In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there’ll be Hell to pay
—The Squirrel Nut Zippers, “Hell”
Look out there. In the distance, toward the horizon. Can you see it? More importantly, can you feel it? A solitary rowboat adrift at sea, the waves like scallop-fringed wraiths from a Japanese woodblock beginning to gather around it, and the individual in that boat, brave and terrified and lost and found all at once, continues what has been called the “awful rowing toward God.” Here, now, comes the soundtrack, as if the silver linings in clouds host angels porcelain voices: Row row row your boat / Gently down the stream / Merrily merrily merrily merrily / Life is a but a dream. Or nightmare. Track #2 is is the remix of another cheery children’s tune: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round…. Will the wheels ever stop? What kind of bus is this? Is there a way to get off? Where is it going, really? And the bus driver, with the missing eye and wax-slicked moustache and non-existent lips, why doesn’t he ever say a word? Just leers into the rearview from time to time, where you can’t tell if his one good eye is full of malice or mischief or both. These, and other liminally hazardous forms of travel, constitute the transit inner-verse as constructed by Yelena Moskovich.
John Biscello 