Description
Bombshelter Press, 2019; 6″ x 9″, 50pgs, 15 new poems
Reviews
To read the poetry of Jack Grapes is to enjoy the bounty of this world along with the daily tasks and emotional trials, ever grateful for this life, knowing the way is never easy, but that it can be blessed and memorialized in poems.
Richard Jones, The Blessing, Stanger on Earth, and editor of Poetry East
Grapes absorbs the absurdities of his experience: he is intense and vulnerably honest and at his best he can give incidents from his past a touching poignancy, especially since fidelity is another of his merits. I’ve read poems of his in the past that were so true without being sentimental that they counted almost as personal experiences of your own. He is one of the finest poets writing today.
Rich Mangelsdorff, Kaleidoscope
I’m not sure that Jack Grapes’ magic could be pinned down even with a long involved analysis. His style is so unique—relaxed and playful one minute, dropping a bomb the next. He’s a master at using ordinary language to paint fantastic, sometimes surrealistic events and images. I find phrases here, techniques there, that remind me of many great writers, but I can’t compare Jack Grapes to anyone, nor find an underlying influence at work. He seems to have absorbed the best of them all and used what he likes to forge his own unmistakable style. He’s a writer who can spin magic from everyday English, and who will keep your eyes glued to the very last line.
Jim Burns, Shattersheet
The voice in the poems is his voice, unique, singular. I get the feeling they can be touched, tasted, torn into butterflies without dying.
Brown Miller, San Francisco Poetry Review
