Description
Bombshelter Press, 2014, 6″ x 9″, 50 pgs
Includes author painting, “Self-Portrait” and reproduction of poet’s 5th grade vocabulary test from 1952 with drawings of World War I bi-planes dropping bombs on the words below.
Reviews
This is a self-assured book of poetry featuring a wide variety of styles and voices. Yet, there is a consistent theme here handled with sensitivity, humor, and enormous grace: the vulnerability of age and the awareness of one’s mortality. I found myself reading the poems again and again, discovering something new each time.
Scott Mayer, Southern California Quarterly of Poetry
These poems have the feel of an artist working on his final chapter, where all pretense is gone. We used to laugh at love poems, how stupid and impossible they were. But he’s doing it, writing beautiful love poems to the life he has lived.
Chiwan Choi, Write Large Press
Grapes speaks for the extraordinary in the ordinary, for the life in old shoes, the overcoat you didn’t hang up, the doilies on the end of the sofa, for whatever life, humanity, or possibility that can come from chaos. In his work and in his presentation of himself, a surface geniality frequently masks something dark and bloody. This flip-flop from genial buffoonery to commandant of the dark side seems to be paradigmatic of Grapes’ approach to poetry.
Nancy Shiffrin.” Los Angeles Times
