Gerry LaFemina is not so much a presence in contemporary poetry as a blur of movement, a quick phrase of enlightenment, a dharma bum of punk and junk. He watches nuns getting drunk in a bar, hears Leonard Cohen on the juke, drinks the blaze of light in every glass. Like Whitman, who inspired both Kinnell and Kerouac, LaFemina understands the body's demands, "Its sweat, toils, & passions. It's holy vigor." LaFemina rides the rapids of contemporary America: pain and ecstasy, ruin and treasure, angels and vultures, half-moon like a half-eaten cookie are confused in a cascade of feeling, an elegy for wild love and boundless grief. -Michael Simms "What is it about the past / that it seems to want to last, to linger into the present?" poet Gerry LaFemina asks us in this powerful collection of poems. Here, remembrances of a precarious childhood in a decaying city illuminate the details of our contemporary moment. These are songs of innocence and experience, in which the gaze of an adult reminiscent narrator makes meaning of a complicated past-unearthing both unnoticed beauties and unacknowledged terrors. Hurtling into the uncertainties of a future that is simultaneously unrecognizable yet familiar, LaFemina finds foothold in fleeting sweetness, in the beauty of the ephemeral moment. In these gorgeously tumbling lyrical lines, meticulously-honed images and details are polished to a burnished glow by the sheen of memory and loss. LaFemina writes, "This is how / we learn heartache, how even a name can be haunted / because a name can be a house we live in for years / waking in the empty rooms of its syllables." After all that is named within this syllabary of poems, the reader will depart the book feeling recognized, feeling haunted, feeling sung to and prayed for, feeling comforted and irrevocably human. -Lee Ann Roripaugh

Palpable Magic features re-readings and reviews of such late 20th Century poets as Anne Sexton, Larry Levis, Charles Wright, Patricia Goedicke, and Wendell Berry, as well as provides commentaries on poetic craft, the prose poem, and what it means to be a poet. LaFemina's musings on poetry are fascinating and curious; the re-readings are not old grounds covered in old measures but as poems and books seen fresh, candidly, sometimes irreverently but always respectfully. LaFemina is a shrewd critic, and these essays cause us to become necessarily inquisitive and curious. He shows his readers, time and again, that poetry is magical, intense, and necessary to our lives.

"Little Heretic" presents one person's pilgrimage back to the New York of his youth, where the City is seen not for the ghosts of junkies, musicians and ex-lovers that haunt it, but for the spiritual and creative possibility lurking in alleys and parks, and celebrated by street corner buskers and subway graffiti. A twenty-first century poet in New York, this book looks at how in the right light of a Manhattan morning, a pigeon flying across First Avenue just might be one of Rilke's angels.

Fiction. Part punk rock concept album, part poetic observation, and part man-in-the-street reporting, WISH LIST, Gerry LaFemina's debut collection of stories, chronicles the lives of people who just might be someone you know. His characters--alienated teens, mid-life crisis adults, those suffering from loss or from love--are survivors of the ordinary traumas of America. Sometimes funny, sometimes tender, sometimes heartbreaking, these stories invite us into a world that those familiar with LaFemina's poems will know: one willed with pathos and grit.

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the English into Italian by Elisa Biagini. Winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize. "What draws me to Gerry LaFemina's poems is how much of the world they contain: Brooklyn streets, race-tracks, Vietnam, a boy's imagined transgressions, family dramas. What is compelling is the tension between the speaker's urge to understand and the mystery that resists explanation--the partial understandings, the misunderstandings of childhood.... Public and private collide, intersect, as events and images become more difficult to reconcile, to describe. LaFemina's poems ripple with erotic desire, the budding sexuality of young boys, the lure of the nape hidden under a woman's hair, the interiority of the boy who'd slid into the sleeve of the dark suit left by his father. It's a rich world...a gritty and tender gamble"--Donna Masini.

Poetry. "In THE WINDOW FACING WINTER, the urgency of the beautiful andsometimes murderous urban landscape, set alongside the seductive, intricateoasis of the Japanese garden, renders possible a vision into 'sliver ofthe absolute.' With unflinching accuracy, LaFemina delivers a sacred, ifmomentary, world, laying bare its essential loneliness, its obstinatebeauty" --Robin Behn.

Poetry. "VANISHING HORIZON is full of gritty and graceful intelligence. Consistently and sumptuously detailed, these poems amount to a kind of landscape of the soul, that aspect of self that runs the gauntlet--weathers, wearies, kneels--then grins and keeps on. It's hard to make a way in this world, to see clearly without coming to deep despair. This book is good light"--Tim Seibles.