In Memory of the Fast Break 14+

📘 Mike Sweeney delivers hard-hitting, power-packed poems that are apocalyptic in their vision of a world gone wrong, a broken world in which "pipelines explode in Iraq & Babylonian artifacts/ litter the promenades." His heaped-up images plunge the reader into toxic skies, turnpike jazz, and the pain that comes from the knowledge that "no matter who you ever were they get you in the end." Yet there is, throughout, the energy and saving power of language, the power that enables you to "damn near levitate." Nicholas Rinaldi, author of Between Two Rivers, The Jukebox Queen of Malta, Bridge Fall Down, and The Luftwaffe in Chaos, Professor Emeritus, Fairfield University .steady, grounded, human, subtle, sane. He's a big guy & a good man. Allen Ginsberg If Gerard Manley Hopkins were to wax poetic on Michael Jordan, the poems might look like Mike Sweeney's. Not only has Sweeney found a voice, he has invented a form all his own. Read In Memory of the Fast Break aloud. It's beautiful - to eye and ear! Fearless, learned, muscular, musical, walloping, and possessed of soul and gravitas, this poetry offers lucid unsentimental reportage on a world simultaneously sumptuous and bitter, luminous portraiture of human flesh engaged in the sometimes ludicrous, sometimes heroic quest for some semblance of a physical or metaphysical personal best, and expansive heroic rhythms which are sorely missing from most contemporary verse. Sweeney writes about polit...