The Comeback's Exoskeleton by Matthew Rotando

Incorporating the density of Spanish surrealism and a sprawling Whitmanesque line, this amazing first book finds Rotando engaged in a poetic biathlon that draws equally from maximal and minimal traditions. There are tight, economical poems, free verse forms derived from the sonnet, poems leaping about the page, but my favorites are the wonderful prose poems tumbling over and under themselves toward gnomish statements that feel both didactic and self-parodying.

-Tim Peterson, Since I Moved In

Theater of War by Nicholas Powers

In this detournement of political statements like the U.S. National Security Strategy Report, a reader will inquire when is "the truth" blurred; conversely, when does Powers' alternative reading come painfully close to the real? The author's hard-hitting, farcical longer-form poems might have constituted a part one, dissolving into the more empathetic, injured fragments. But his choreographed admixture embodies how emotions come. Anger interspersed with hurt; a loudly reinterpreted official voice, broken by still louder whispers.

-Bruna Mori, Derive

S.P.A.W.N. (Sunset Park Art & Writing Newsletter) began in 1997 as a nonprofit, noncommercial, biannual publication with the intent to make more known the unknown makers of poetry and creators of art based in Brooklyn...

Forthcoming:

Born Palestinian, Born Black (New Edition)
by Suheir Hammad

Spring 2009

My Ethnik Dreamworld
by Cihan Kaan

Winter 2009