Year of Valentines

In Year of Valentines, John Reed writes 80+ valentines to “you” (the loved one, the missed one, the lost one), and to New York City itself. Passionate and cool tempered, Reed’s second collection of sonnets sees creative origins in the No Wave movement—the set of his childhood—with its splendor of dissipation, and merciless affections.

The poems in John Reed’s Year of Valentines are intense, vivacious, and addictive. Reed’s lines and phrases captivate with their wholly original blend of urbanity and rawness, precision and surprise. —Peter Campion

Readers of contemporary poetry have marveled at what Diane Seuss and Terrance Hayes have accomplished with the serial form. To illuminate another brilliant practitioner, I give you John Reed. … These sonnets follow the misadventures of lovers who slip in and out of identities, variously becoming puppets, magicians, gamblers, witches, skeletons. It’s the speaker in these sonnets who anchors the project. Part id and part lovelorn ghost, we follow a voice into Luna Park and keep going, back into the very real experience of wanting what we want. —Laura Cronk

As John Reed's valentines move ever more deeply into their music, memory becomes prophetic and commemoration a guarantor of further love. Not since the sonic valentines of Zukofsky's shaping has this gentle form accomplished so fine a purpose. —Donald Revell

The cauldron of the heart is fired by the energy of love in all its manifestations. Through the mystery and transformation in the blood, along with reading John Reed’s Year of Valentines, we may become puppets of love or puppets out of love. One day, maybe, our souls will exit from the wooden flesh of our bodies into greater longevity. Who knows? In startlingly original imagery, Reed pumps the readers’ arteries and veins with the sassy brew from his poetic cauldron.
—Richard Martin

Reed is a real New York City character—mysterious yet completely accessible, old-school but cutting-edge. A few years ago, he started sharing some newly written sonnets ... Although they were largely about love, or desire, they weren’t really fit for readers looking for happy-ever-after scenarios. Many ended with a narrator seemingly suspended above a great metaphorical chasm, either about to descend into oblivion or ascend to something sublime. —Gee Henry

Reed is a heartthrob of a writer. —Molly Peacock

John Reed is the author of ten books, including the novels A Still Small Voice (Delacorte), The Whole (Simon & Schuster/MTV Books), and the SPD bestseller Snowball's Chance (Roof/Melville House); the definitive non-fiction works A Drama In Time: The New School Century (Profile) and The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, and the Origin of Animal Farm (Palgrave Macmillan); the play All The World's A Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare (Penguin/Plume); and his highly-praised first collection of sonnets Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems (C&R Press). His essay "My Grandma the Poisoner" was selected for Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin). His work has also appeared in publications such as Tin House, Artforum, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Harpers, and Rolling Stone. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and graduate certificates from Parsons School of Design. He is an Associate Professor and the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.