Sipping Coffee @ Carmela's
by Joe Amato
“Despite the dedicatio/warning — ‘not for everyone’ — this book is indeed for everyone. Joe Amato is a straight talker able to weave those tough gossamer gab lines into strands for a dinger of a poetry rope lassoing the facts. The work’s (manu)facture enlivens an endangered species: a poetry of facts, with which he drives a word-stake through the American (wet) dream. Hear, hear him, comrades, read Amato’s hoarse-powered ode for this ‘Poor dumb oilrigged hydrofracked Fukushima’d bastard / civilization’ — though there is nothing oily about his message, because ‘Wethinks poetry is crude, baby, fundamentally crude.’ And needs to be so in/for a country where ‘we note what strange fruit falls / with supremacist fictions run amok.’ This ‘blues that stays news,’ these ‘Urgencies of some noirceur, police / state tactics…’ need a poetry-vérité as we speak of a cinéma vérité and Joe Amato’s eye & ear for these Younighted States — close cousins to Jean Rouch’s hand-held camera — manage to scan an ‘Earth that at its best is one hell of a / paradise.'”
-Pierre Joris, author of An American Suite & A Nomad Poetics