.A Short History of Monsters
“We are the happy riders on the stream of Padua’s consciousness...a smart, sympathetic mind at work.”
— Billy Collins (editor)
Drawing on the spirit of New York City in decades past, A Short History of Monsters
presents the sins and obsessions of a poet nimble in beat and slam
traditions.
In his first full-length collection, Jose Padua wrestles
with an American dream interrupted by failure, excess, and other
nightmares. Often brash and unruly, these poems range from recollections
of lost, drunken days to unadorned manifestations of hope.
Throughout,
the speaker redefines his relationship to pop culture, praising it,
skewering it, and mourning it by turns.
The poems that make up A Short History of Monsters tend
toward both dark humor and epiphany, diving deeply into their own
despair and rising up again with existential absurdity.
This is a poetry
that gets down into the grit and grime of the real world, digging out a
space to experience being alive as miraculous in and of itself. More
Supported in part by the Arkansas Humanities Council, the
National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Miller and Lucinda
Williams Poetry Fund.
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