a collection of 59 poems Percesepe's poetry seems straightforward but is as complex as flowers, as summer shade and layers of snowfall, available to all but folded around secrets only broken lovers or philosophers grasp, and contained by no borrowed forms but original truths and no meter but the throbs of a heart. He here assays breakfast making and love making and loss and memory and time and husbands and wives and offspring and always, always, the elegance of the line, the object plain or sublime or both, the landscapes of sex, sorrow and high style. James Robison Gary Percesepe drops you into an ambiguous world and pulls you back again, still reeling. He does it so deftly, you don't even realize you're bleeding until it's over. Heather Cox, author of California King

A collection of 26 flash fiction pieces. These rapid and arresting short stories will keep you on your toes. Percesepe is a master of sharp turns, and, oh, how greatly I admire the stuff he notices, all of life's "brilliant surprises," and his concern with how people who bust up stay apart, because what can we do with the delayed understanding that happens after the leaving? This collection is a tender rush. Pia Ehrhardt, author of 'Famous Fathers & Other Stories' Gary Percesepe writes beautiful, vivid stories with the intensity and brevity of a man on the run. His fiction lights up the page with incredible bursts of poetry, passion, and pain channeled through characters whose names we rarely catch. In just a few short pages, Percesepe captures entire worlds of emotion - all of it so true and real, it's impossible to look away. Jessica Anya Blau, author of 'The Wonder Bread Summer'

What May Have Been is a novel in letters exchanged between the artist Jackson Pollock and his fictional lover, a young woman called Dori G. Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe have created a sexy and luminous love story that takes place sometime during the late 1940's, in that sandy wonderland at the eastern tip of Long Island known as The Hamptons. Advance Praise for What May Have Been "In this extraordinary novel, Pollock tells his lover that things like paint and wives are very small in the scheme of things. Gary Percesepe and Susan Tepper show how the great scheme of things is, in fact, in literary art, captured in paint and wives and a Montauk surf and a silky scarf and narrow hips and a cold water flat and a used Ford. Brilliantly conceived, brilliantly executed, this is a stunning book about art and about life." -Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain "The fictional letters between Pollock and an imaginary Dori G come out in a hailstorm of paint flecks, lockets, long looks, kisses, blowing sand. Dori sees Jackson in his distance and his nearing, and his return to her like the visit of one of the Greek gods to his mortal lover, as piercing and as fatal." -Mary Grimm, author of Left to Themselves and Stealing Time "How to convey the irresistible pleasures of this novel in letters? The language mimics the slashing, dramatic immediate heroic gestures of abstract expressionism, is an extraordinary act of poetic invention, and tells a sexy and doomed love story." -James Robison, author of The Illustrator and Rumors "These two fervent voices exude the splendor and gloom of adulterous love." -Mark Wisniewski, author of Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman