Tony Gloeggler writes narrative poetry with the lyrical nonchalance of everyday NYC language infused with splashes of Monk's jazzy stop and start, quirky intonations that interweave the past and present. What Kind of Man is filled with stories to tell on late night Brooklyn stoops, secrets and confessions whispered to your closest friends or maybe only yourself that seek a heightened form of unguarded communication. The poems in What Kind of Man emanate from the narrator dealing with kidney disease to engage everything from family, sexuality, race, work, aging, love, loss, and loneliness to finding blessings in the most unexpected places. The book explores how his world changes, the way he views it, and the people who fill it, especially himself. Tony Gloeggler's What Kind of Man finds and defines the kind of (hu)man the narrator was, is, and hopes to become. |
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In searingly honest narrative poems, Tony Gloeggler explores the complexities of loss, love, illness, and family. But beating at the heart of What Kind of Man is Gloeggler's compassion, his ability to empathize with others whose experiences are vastly different from his own. In What Kind of Man, he answers his own question and by the time we turn the last page, we know that he's a brave, unflinching, and loving man who intertwines past and present to define what it means to be human.
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award Winner
There's an honesty in Tony Gloeggler's work that's absent in so much poetry being written, and a fullness. Some of the poems in What Kind Of Man are master classes in themselves on how to take risks, how to deal with uncomfortable, hard truths. Most poets�hell, most writers, period�cannot write about his and other people's lives this well.
—Hayan Charara, author of Something Sinister
Tony Gloeggler is the master of a kind of poem I've been turning towards for decades: narrative poems told with a New York nonchalance of the neighborhoods we live in, and the ones of our past: poems that move fluidly into a memory whether it is music: Miles Davis, the Beach Boys, Springsteen, or illness, or something someone says or does, even basketball as a pivot step back, a sort of story-telling of remembrance to help us live. And Tony's poems do just that�help us to live if we listen.
—Sean Thomas Dougherty
Gloeggler�s lines are deceptively simple but their impact is fierce and they raise common life events with extraordinary skill to��and this will embarrass him�to art. Like a driving lay-up in the lane, Gloeggler's work seems easy. Then you watch the replay a few times and are struck by all the small perfections that makes it look inevitable. These poems kick ass.
—Angelo Verga is the author of Long & Short, including The Street in Your Head
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