"Eating a Cheeseburger During the End Times" is a document of the anxiety and depression, the fear and the pain, of a man lodged mid-life in a country continuing to shoot fireworks off over the trash heap of its ever-declining sustainability. There are moments of humor in this book, but they are dark and biting. There are remembrances of times past, but they are mostly of humiliation or resentfulness. Alcohol and music provide temporary relief from the miseries of this bad dream of life. These poems recognize the fragility of our lives and rage at the selfishness and greed of others. We are living in an uncertain, unraveling world. John Grochalski is holding up a mirror showing us where we're at, daring us to look ourselves in the eye."
-Scott Silsbe, author of Muskrat Friday Dinner
"Poet John Grochalski is the spokesman we all want when life kicks us in the nuts!! Powerful brilliant poems that will shock you at how honest and real they are, and how powerfully they are conveyed. His anger, his love, and his compassion are all on display as only a poet of the highest order can convey them!! One of Americas most needed voices especially right now."
-Matt Borczon, author of Saved Rounds
"There is a moment of clarity, a moment that's codified right before some great unraveling. The problem with that moment is you don't recognize it as a precipice or for that fact as anything out of the ordinary until after it happens. As I read Eating a Cheeseburger During the End Times, I see that moment. I see that moment through Vodka and Red Wine glasses, I see it stumbling into middle age with time turning into fragments of memory and random interactions, I see it in the failed state that we've become. Grochalski poems are rusty and weary and just getting by in that codified moment, a bleak last second of this now interminable American unraveling."
--Jason Baldinger, author of A Threadbare Universe
"Eating a Cheeseburger During The End Times is not a flowery abstract poetic
metaphor for scarf wearing literary suburbans, it's grounded in the concrete world
that we feel beneath our feet, that we smell as we wish we were elsewhere; a world we often try and forget. John Grochalski captures the desperation of our times with each careful dissection of the mundanity of each passing day. A love letter to Brooklyn punctuated with urban rot and reflection. If these words haven't perfectly
captured the existential dread of our current plight than none ever will."
-Damian Rucci, author of Don't Call it a Relapse!
