SlapstickGravitas Format: TradePaperback

Over the course of his seventy years, Mikhail Horowitz reports being an English Romantic poet of the early 19th century, a Chinese hermit poet of the Tang Dynasty, a neo-Beat jazz poet of the Third Millennium, a proto-Surrealist and Oulipo poet of Paris between the wars, and a postmodern poet and spoken word performer in an increasingly medieval America. This volume offers a generous selection of his various avatars, featuring poems and prose pieces that are bracing, ludic, and often madly obsessive.

Mikhail Horowitz is the author of two collections of collages with risible texts — Big League Poets (City Lights, 1978), and Ancient Baseball (Alte Books, 2020). He has published two volumes of poetry, The Opus of Everything in Nothing Flat (Red Hill, 1993), and Rafting Into the Afterlife (Codhill Press, 2007). His performance work, with jazz and/or acoustic musicians, has been featured on a dozen CDs, including The Blues of the Birth (Sundazed Records), a collection of jazz fables, and the anthology album Bring It On Home, Vol. II (Columbia Records). He lives in Saugerties, deep in the woods on the former site of a 19th-century bluestone quarry, with the printmaker Carol Zaloom.