Many of Ted Jonathan's poems are drawn from his experience in the Bronx where he lived until the year 1999. His poems are accessible rhythmic compositions. They're dark in the way real life is—profound, and dead on funny—some are superbly distilled stories, but behind it all is a gentle love and clear sanity that makes it all memorable. |
|
When you read Run think lean, chiseled, sardonic verse. He’s packed a memoir into Run, and one that doesn't move chronologically but tonally. I dare you to find a wasted word in a Ted Jonathan poem, a line ending that doesn't break just right. It's all here—equal measure comedy and tragedy. This collection reminds us that poetry need not be abstract or homogenized same-speak, it need not be humorless.
—Stephanie Dickinson
Herein lies a concoction of imagination and experience. Run is filled with beauty and strange happenings, of love and brutality, of painful, awkward and paradoxical sexual experiences, of magic and madness, of a high-noon showdown between good and evil somewhere in upper Manhattan, of mad men upended by even crazier men, of bizarre-yet-sensical logic where miscarriages serve as a kind of saving grace. Yet, no matter what happens in this world, there is always humor, dignity, and loyalty, the stuff that gives hope in all this madness.
—Bunkong Tuon
|
