Description:
Poetry by M.G. Stephens and collages by Archie Rand. Old Popeye cartoons are the subject, satire verbal and visual is the intent. Popeye and Olive Oyl, Bluto and Wimpy all gather in the present as an epipsychidian flavored with American ease and powerful punches that land, Blam!, directly on the lantern jawed.
Brief description: M. G. Stephens (Michael Gregory Stephens) was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and further out on Long Island, into a family of sixteen children. His father came from Ireland and his mother was from an old New England family whose ancestors included a North African indentured servant to the Wheelock family, the founders of Dartmouth College. His mother grew up in a 27-room Brooklyn mansion on Madison near Stuyvesant, right where Spike Lee shot Do the Right Thing, which was also a few blocks from where Stephens lived as a child. He has been around boxing all his life. He also worked various jobs, including a stint in the Merchant Marine, greens-keeping, being a caddy, Christmas tree salesman on the Lower East Side, gas-pump jockey, dishwasher, East Asia correspondent, bartender, and of course journeyman boxer and sparring partner. He lived for many years (15) in London, but now resides just north of Chicago, and has been exiled from New York for over twenty-five years. Kid Coole is the third novel about the Coole family, the other two being The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and Season at Coole, whose fiftieth anniversary of its publication by E. P. Dutton is in 2022. These novels comprise The Coole Trilogy. Besides Kid Coole, Spuyten Duyvil has just published Stephens' novel, King Ezra, about Ezra Pound.
Review Quotes:
Michael Gregory Stephens is a brilliant writer, with a great imagination and heart. And his prose is downright gorgeous.
Hilma Wolitzer
M. G. Stephens, that dynamo prose stylist, has written a terrific novel, propulsive, action-packed, full of vivid, complicated characters, pleasurable from first to last. His ear for the way people talk is astounding. Kid Coole, his likable if forgetful pugilist-protagonist, may not always remember where his corner in the ring is, but Stephens knows every inch of the boxing canvas. Even those who have no interest in the sport will be drawn into the vortex of this brilliant piece of storytelling.
Phillip Lopate