First you show up for the poetry reading and then you are at the reading except you are in your living room reading a book, and that’s The Tragedy in My Neighborhood – it’s Ken Cormier you’re reading, but it sounds like he’s reading to you. The active part of the poem is coming over to you, performing, projecting, gallivanting, whispering, making raucous and yahoo. Only Ken Cormier situates the poem on a road map, plants it in a garden, launches it into space orbit. His poems don’t sit there –ensconced in prose settings, they race off to heaven, demand payback, take you for a ride in a convertible. No one else does what Ken Cormier does – set the poem free to the Infinite, knowing that it will always return, home, striking gold in them thar hearts. 

Like adding facets to a diamond, Ken Cormier’s talent becomes more brilliant with every new work. With his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek, Ken tackles everyday America with the right combination of weirdness and compassion. His protagonists face the disappointments of life and he handles them with a tenderness usually reserved for babies and small animals. Around their bright bleeding spotlight lurks powder-soft blackness. In this collection, stories ease their narrative between poems of startling surrealistic lucidity laced with heartbreaking truths. 

About the Author:

Ken Cormier is a teacher, performance poet, independent radio producer, and musician. He is the author of Balance Act, a book of poems and stories published by Insomniac Press. His stories and poems have appeared in a number of national journals, and his radiophonic works have been aired on public radio stations around the US. Ken co-founded and edited The Lumberyard: A Radio Magazine of Poetry Prose
and Music, which aired weekly on WHUS in Connecticut from 2005-2008. His third CD of original songs, Nowhere Is Nowhere, was released in 2009 by Cosmodemonic Telegraph Records.