Books like Songs from the Underground

Every once in a while a volume of poetry, prose, eulogies to lost love, work, death, junk, get drunk sing weep lie cheat love, the pissed-off cars from hell, comes along that renews one’s faith in Mankind. Songs of Desperation and Revenge by Jose Arroyo, is such a book.

Published in a limited edition of 50 copies, (which have already sold out) by Hickathrift Press, this important volume showcases Arroyo’s instinctive innate talent as a poet and wordsmith. And crucially this poet has lived, not just one life, but two or three of the fuckers, and it shows in the power and candour of the poetry.

I once wrote an article about the need for writers to have lived a little before putting the word down, and Arroyo’s art is a perfect example of this axiom… All those melt’s rolling off the conveyor belt of the creative writing factories, sure… show more.

Mink Hollow Cabin Songs is a short series of poems written in the Summer of 2018 in woods near the Esopus Creek in New York during a cabin getaway with my love at the time, and then later designed, printed & handbound in Wallingford, PA in 2019.

The poems here are the companions of the prose piece To Infinity, Within, also handbound by the author, and written during the same trip in 2018.