C H A P B O O K S

Strangers in a Homeland (2001)
Jeffrey Loo a.k.a. Jeffrey Lee

In Strangers in a Homeland, Jeffrey Loo writes a poetry of culture that extracts from human suffering a surprising truth.  His brew of erudition, street smarts, and slang eschews the decorative fashion of so much recent American poetry and demands we pay attention to W.C. Williams' edict of urgency.  Reader, here is the news that can save our lives.

-- Marcus Cafagna, author of The Broken World

Jeffrey Loo's poems are delicately lyrical meditations of great tensile strength - more than enough for their weighty subjects, politics and history.  While his own ethnic struggle in and with America informs the writing, his vision is broad, and his inmost focus is not critique but empathy, as evoked by his elegy for Etheridge Knight, a masterpiece.

-- David Moolten, author of Plums and Ashes

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Earth As It Is (1994)  
Jim Elledge

The poems in this collection celebrate our planet and its population from a variety of perspectives.  For example, the title of the opening poem, "Ciao," is significant by virtue of its dual meaning, hello and goodbye, as it views from Mars Rome's Colosseum as a "tooth-/mark on Mother Earth's /breasts" and "Stonehenge [as] only pimples clustered,/ speckling her right cheek."  The poem resolves, however, to earthly lovers.  In like manner, the collection's final poem describes the fantasy of a bestiary on PBS that segues into phantasmagoric shadows created by a pair of humans making love.  In between, we gain perspective on the Goliath who is about to be stoned by Michelangelo's David, graffiti found by Jim Morrison's grave in Pere-Lachaise cemetary, and more, finely wrought in a taut verse, covering a wide range of experience.

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Heavy Metal From Pliny (1992)  

William Sylvester