Wheelchair Samurai

Lee Rossis third book of poems sketches a life in shades of contradiction futility and want. Interrogating the self as ruthlessly as the Grand Inquisitor these poems enact rituals of disillusionment. The self final refuge of beatniks and idealists is discovered to be the quagmire the bodhisattvas warned us about. Rossi advises us to abandon hope - then welcome it when yet again life disappoints every expectation even the most dire. Lee Rossi is a poet of wit and elegance. The poems in his third collection Wheelchair Samurai will engage inform delight and surprise the reader. The range of multilayered subjects is vast: motel sex poverty Descartes and the legendary fly hilarious alternative endings to The Story of O tattoos covering the drive-in movie screen of his [brother-in-laws] back a lunar eclipse death and Francis Bacon. What seems casual at first glance emerges as a profound meditation on life (human animal insect) and nature. We are all inextricably connected in Rossis metaphorical world. [Still there is often an underlying sense of sadness and betrayal.] One poem in particular Letter to a Grandchild is sound advice for living writing loving. This is a poet at the top of his form and the wise reader will sit back and listen. Gloria Vando author of Shadows and Supposes Lee Rossi is a masterful tour guide through landscapes of the sacred and profane a universe of moments both heartbreaking and funny where fighting roosters are pit bulls with feathers and the summer air is a minestrone of milkweed and pollen. These poems are scintillant with wit shot through with sudden revelations and the startling brief gleam of compassion and truth. Like the crowd gathered around a suicide in Almost Icarus Rossi keeps us his readers straining for a glimpse of that body / its imperfect beauty as fragile as our own. Ruth L. Schwartz author of Dear Good Naked Morning and Edgewater As Rossi says in one of these poems surfaces betray. And so he delves finding the truth that lies beneath. The poetry in this compelling collection exposes the dark and the light of human relationships - between husbands and wives soldiers and lovers fathers and sons gods and goddesses. Frances Lefkowitz editor reviewer and author of To Have Not: A Memoir.