A selection of 94 poems by Rob Couteau. Over 40 of these poems were published in 15 different print and online journals between 1985 and 2020.
"The new work might be quite dark, a recognition of the loss that time inevitably entails, yet he also pursued moments of high beauty ... There is a deep tenderness in these words, mingled with the sadness of age. If one goes back to the early poems one can find the tenderness there, too, as it is in his work as a case manager for the poor and homeless. There is much to admire in Couteau's oeuvre, but this tenderness stands out among so many things that make reading his work clearly an important experience."
- Poet, critic, and literary historian Ed Foster, founder of Talisman House, Publishers, and Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. from his Introduction to Selected Poems.
"Selected Poems features a satisfying blend of old and new works designed to appeal to newcomers and prior fans alike. Rob Couteau's works are diverse. They follow no set poetic structure, even defying some of them when the muse strikes and special needs indicate that the subject is more important than poetic form.... His inspections of artistic, literary, and social issues are astute and compelling.... Don't anticipate set structures, uniform poetic approaches, or singular subjects here. Selected Poems offers a freewheeling approach to poems and life alike, and is a thought provoking, evocative gathering of works recommended for literary readers not bound by convention or rules."
- Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review
ROB COUTEAU is a Brooklyn-born author and visual artist. His publications have been praised in Evergreen Review, Publishers Weekly, New Art Examiner, Midwest Book Review, and Witty Partition. In 1985 he won the North American Essay Award, sponsored by the American Humanist Association. His work has been cited in books such as Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Tyrone Simpson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera' by Thomas Fahy, Conversations with Ray Bradbury edited by Steven Aggelis, and David Cohen's Forgotten Millions, a book about the homeless. His interviews include conversations with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Justin Kaplan, Last Exit to Brooklyn novelist Hubert Selby, Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, Picasso's model and muse Sylvette David, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury, film star and bibliophile Neil Pearson, and historian Philip Willan, author Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy. Couteau has appeared as a guest on Bob Barrett's The Best of Our Knowledge (WAMC), Len Osanic's Black Op Radio, and on Monocle 24 in Europe. Since 2020 he has devoted himself to republishing annotated texts of important but forgotten authors such as Stanley Marks, Charles Beadle, and Francis Carco. In 2023 he published Intimate Souvenirs, a memoir featuring an Introduction by Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita and Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.
Founder of Talisman House, Publishers, and Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Ed Foster is one of the most important independent publishers of avant-garde poetry today. A former professor of history and associate dean for administration in the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Foster was also a Fulbright lecturer at Haceteppe University in Ankara, Turkey, and at the University of Istanbul. The recipient of numerous grants and awards from Columbia University, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is author of over forty books of poetry, criticism, biography, and literary history.
