It's Not About You

Its Not About You by Daniel Casey punches hard and heavy and pierces sharp and shrill an inconvenient but imperative truth some of us are gleefully unaware of others choose to ignore while the rest only see themselves as right and righteous. Casey confronts grueling realities in our society such as the effects of colonization systemic oppression privilege entitlement fears without facts with grit and candor while also being demanded and demanding more of himself than being among / a colorless one-dimensional people. This thought-provoking poetry collection is an urgent calling to challenge ourselves to Be better do better. And hope our collective history will persevere and triumph as white light suddenly wiping the slate clean in time.Nadia Gerassimenko poet and founding editor of Moonchild MagazineDaniel Caseys Its Not About You takes aim at the evils of our days - from Brock Turner to Donald Trump to the mealy-mouthed term millennial deployed to tone-police and silence. He employs fucking liberally for emphasis uses tarot as a form calls out Southern dogs Kansas sunflowers and white people. Moments of lyric beauty - Let your throat warble / sounding some exquisite bliss / to the exclusion of all else - are juxtaposed with fantastically honed anger: The legacy / of the Baby Boom will be / a kind of aggressive myopia / like the not all men/all lives / matter. The title is a lie - these poems are about us.C. Kubasta @CKubastathePoet author of Of Covenants & This Business of the Flesh In a 2007 essay Robert Pinsky called for difficult poetry: poetry that pushes us to confront truths we dont want to face. The poems in Daniel Caseys Its Not About You answer this call. In the spirit of Philip Larkin Caseys poems push us to examine the uncomfortable realities of human nature - apathy rage disdain - and what it means to live in a nation fueled by prejudice and greed focused on the myriad ways we find to destroy what you love. And yet there is hope here that if we know full well our darker nature we can resist it and through this challenging work we can be better do better.Emma Bolden Associate Editor-in-Chief Tupelo Quarterly www.emmabolden.com