Description:
Another installment of Howie Good's legacy, Gunmetal Sky are poems that inventively blur the line between lyric and broadside, confronting an increasingly hostile world with poignancy, wry humor, and a sense of the surreal. There's no sun behind this sky but there's plenty of shade.
Review Quotes:
"Howie Good is a master of the prose poem. Like Bob Dylan during the Highway 61 era, Howie's poems dismantle culture and history, reassembling them in forms that seem bizarre and unfamiliar, but that are immediately, viscerally felt. His work disorients and disturbs. It challenges cute interpretations and simple, comfortable narratives about our complex and often incoherent world. It moves."
-William H. Duryea, Editor-in-Chief of Misery Tourism
"Howie Good takes our simple tools and builds cathedrals. His insights and revelations come naturally and honestly and from unexpected places somehow made familiar. What better gift can a writer give a reader? There is no better prose poet writing today and Gunmetal Sky is his best work yet."
-Sheldon Lee Compton, author of Sway
"Prose poetry has been called poetry's step-child. If that's true, then Howie Good is one terrific stepfather. His poems dance along with all the lively inventiveness of a jazz band imitating a marching band. His one personal and vast theme is the price of consequences: loving too hard, hating too much, or not paying attention to the penny on the doorstep. He can start out in a surreal landscape and end up in your grandmother's backyard. This collection confirms what his other collections suggested: Howie Good is a major poet."
-Mike James, author of Crows in the Jukebox
"I have been reading Howie Good's work for more than 15 years and seen him emerge as a master of prose poetry of the kind collected in Gunmetal Sky. I continue to marvel at his gift for artfully assembling seemingly unrelated ideas into blocks of text with remarkable coherence. I write this one week after the attempted insurrection of the US Capitol. I wonder if regular readers note, as I do, that Good's work, so often featuring brutal dictators, merciless regimes, horrors of state violence against its own citizenry, feels increasingly prophetic. This is poetry for adults and for those who refuse to turn away from the darkness of our world and our tragic failure to tame our demons."
-Dale Wisely, editor of Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken, and First Frost.