Description: Written in three sections, Starving Romantic explores themes of loss, family, home, and love through a hyperreal lyricism. The backdrops are often the forgotten Midwest, the sprawling landscapes of Detroit, and the anonymous house, complete with porch and backyard.
Brief description: VINCENT JAMES PERRONE is a writer and musician from Detroit, Michigan. He is a winner of the Christopher T. Leland Scholarship in Creative Writing and former Editor-in-chief of the Wayne Literary Review.
Review Quotes:
Perrone's poems brilliantly crack open the wheezy engine that drives so many of our desires to journey toward homes both real and implied, metaphorical and visceral, dreamed and invoked. In this cracking open, Perrone reveals such an electric disappointment, the dependence of longing on close examination, and a seized, if still revivable, Midwestern kind of heart. - Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost
Starving Romantic is a brilliant debut. A meditation on finitude, contingency, and desire, the personae are caught between Greyhound bus stops in a landscape of doubt. Restless, unattached,
yet self-possessed and wise, the voices that emerge in the poems are resolute. Like Michigan weather, we can't know our internal seasons, either, but it is "good / to be/ anything at all." - Caroline Maun, author of The Sleeping and What Remains
Vincent James Perrone's first book Starving Romantic is a major poetry debut from this young Detroit poet. With the earthy heart of Philip Levine and the inventiveness in language and form of e e cummings, this book is a treasure to behold. - M.L. Liebler, author of the award winning I Want to Be Once
These are beautiful, real-life poems in language that's just the right amount of music and horror, a set of dream poems and surreal memories and desires from the raw, present moment. - Douglas Cole, author of Bali Poems and Western Dream
Vincent James Perrone's Starving Romantic time and again tilts the world on its axis, investigates the degree of said tilt, and then with precision offers to the reader moments that are at once universal and intimate. This collection did much more than make the romantic in me starve--it fed my sense of exploration. - Garrett Dennert, author of Wounded Tongue
Starving Romantic is a brief confrontation with mirror images. These poems confront their own memories and melodramas, examining the function of longing and how it affects the soul. Perrone expertly evokes the language of nostalgia. - Mike Corrao, author of Man, Oh Man!