Cursed Houses

Cursed Houses by David O’Nan swirls with dynamic imagery at a manic pace. Its long probing lines are propelled by maddening spirals of rhythm and rhyme. These poems bob and weave, teasing dreamscapes out of rich details inhabited by a host of characters and situations earthly and un-. Love, lust, loss, bewilderment – degradation of the human spirit coupled with the uplift of having experienced something wholly holy. Cursed Houses offers room after room of astonishment wrapped in acute observations: standing outside, lonesome and creepy, a piercing inward gaze.

• Tony Brewer, author of psithurism and Pity for Sale

What gives you the right to deny the beauty, the honesty of poetry. There is no such thing as an endless straight line.
The shortest distance between two points is poetic distance. Poetry is the way. No one makes it through any black hole of night without the morning light of poetry. The debate over whether formal or informal, Latinate or colloquial is best is meaningless. Critics and Judges are the greatest fools. Poetry is the journey, the adventure in and through the valley of the shadow of death.
Poetry is birth, the journey, and death. Poetry is Alpha and Omega. Poetry is life. Life is poetry. The word was the same
in the beginning as the word is now. Say the word. Be the word. Be poetry. Be the poem you write. What else is there?
In his brilliant new book, CURSED HOUSES, David O'Nan is the poet of birth, the journey, and death.
David O'Nan is an original. One of a kind. I can't recommend his work highly enough."

--Ron Whitehead, Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate

"David L O'Nan's Cursed Houses is a lyrical poetry book that carries so many themes, it's hard to select a few. O'Nan transmits storytelling, narratives, and short story genres within his poems with brilliance. Poems about love, society, death, loss, small town Americana, and loneliness stand out the most. At the heart of these poems is O'Nan's ability to make you feel how the memories of past loves can still be felt in the present time."

- Christina Strigas, “for all the lonely hearts being pulled out of the ground”

David L O’ Nan’s new book, Cursed Houses, from it’s haunting spooky cover to the end prose-piece, is a scorcher – a work of narratives and lyrics, an anxious mythic exploration of landscapes of broken shattered people; some likeable, poignantly portrayed, others monstrous, the walking-living Dead; their political screed like larvae spreading hate, the drunk military fathers, farmers, drifters and grifters, the abject young women and older matriarchs, full of hope and lies. Almost Biblical, its a book of character studies exploring upended toxic glamour, hopelessness, the cracks inside America where people fall.

We see ourselves and others, our stories and-our-not-stories in a calm-frenzy of bardic, balladic currency and lyrical leaps. In a poem to a dead brother, the narrator speaks beyond despair, of “Popping firework amphetamine pills, dragons watch the alleys/The abusive and abused in corners and in jars./Oh lonesome traveler, a blood kissed jewel.” Tangled and mournful – this book’s rapid-fire pulse is a circling, uniquely crafted, blistering collection. Bite down hard, get one, roam through its outlaw pages. –

• Robert Frede Kenter, author, visual artist, publisher of Ice Floe Press.