AmericanMental

Here is a poet making known the complaints that bounce around unexpressed inside our own heads a kind of Larry David with line breaks. In a rare upbeat moment he writes of course theres people/being born but And its in that but that the Jurkovic vision resides. In his universe somethings gone missing the wife controls the Ambien and Dylan was wrong. Still theres a bit of that Nobel Laureate running throughout American Mental a kind of sub-Canadian worldsick blues that propels the reader with great velocity and wordplay and original insight through its pages.-Tim Tomlinson is the author of Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poems) and This Is Not Happening to You (stories). He is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and teaches in New York Universitys Global Liberal Studies. Mike Jurkovic is either the William Carlos Williams Allan Ginsberg or Charles Bukowski of the Hudson Valley. Reflecting their influences his work is drawn from his unique blueprint the poems built of his singularly barbed brick and mortar. Grounded in reality AmericanMental spews beauty humor and rage at the sublimely monotonous. One envisions the poet spent under a Bodhi tree with a tall drink - a blue Buddha shaking his head in disbelief as all the psychosis slides east on Thursdays watching us thicken with laughing eyes. Read this cry from the fist throw back your head and shout!-Janet Hamills A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems 1975-2007 was recently published by Spyuten Duyvil AmericanMental gives us a poet at the top of his game. Iconoclastic impulse wrestles progressive idealism in the town of shit-lorn. Here we confront pettiness inequality & desperation as felt by many whove had the misfortune of believing in that American Dream: success for all & everyone only to find it doesnt exist. Thats not to say life is perfect elsewhere. No. These poems challenge hypocrisy & injustice wherever found. Crack the cover - a rousing ride awaits!-Roger Aplon Editor/Publisher Waymark - Voices of the Valley; author Barcelona Diary Its Only TV and from Unsolicited Press: Mustering Whats Left - Selected & New Poems 1976 - 2017