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THAT APRIL Bill Kushner 89 pages, paperback Cover by Donna Cartelli ISBN: 0-935332-1-1 Copyright © 2000 $10.00 Bill Kushner is the author of Night Fishing (1980), Head (1986), Love Uncut (1990) and He Dreams of Rivers (2000). His work has been anthologized in Up Late (4 Walls 8 Windows, 1987), In Our Time: The Gay and Lesbian Anthology (St. Martin s, 1989), Out of This World (Crown, 1991) and The Best American Poetry (Scribners, 2002), and has appeared in numerous magazines, including The World, Rattapallax and Lungfull. He has received two grants in poetry from the New York Foundation of the Arts and lives in New York City. "That April is a spectacular book. Bill Kushner writes poems made out of fluttering wings. His poet walks the street reading teeshirts, stays home and remembers "there was an old man here before me." He makes tea and toasts his own splendiferous aging. These are such warm, horny, homey, lovely human poems. His dying father crying "Hold me!" and a much much younger man (Kushner's then lover) slip in and out of this collection of lyrics. The world is a luminous empty human body changing hands or souls. Reading this I don't feel alone, then I do." Eileen Myles "Kushner's sharp, high-pressure rhythms, syntax, and music risk everything to turn "our absurd life" toward the ecstasies we're promised and seldom get. Violent streets, his father's death, and AIDS are seen with a passion that stops the spiral down and leaves brilliant poetry in its wake. Pure alchemy." Ed Foster "In one of these wonderful notebook poems, Bill Kushner refers to himself as a "humble gay visionary poet." He is exactly that, and much more: a true poet of the fluid moment, of the ache of desire, of rain-slick New York streets. A post-Stonewall Whitman, Kushner surrenders himself to "the throes of passion there is no cure for"; embraces, in his fleeting sky blue memos, "what can never be found." His (and our) reward: "exquisite true sadness." The highest prize." David Trinidad UPDATED ORDERING INFO COMING SOON RETURN TO BOOK LIST |
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