Bøger af John Tessitore

On Self-Expression After the Revolution is a collection of poems and photographs set in New York City, among the winners and losers of the American Dream. By turns angry, determined, erotic...it is a humanistic cry, a plea for a new body politics, a song of resistance in the shadows and glare of corporate capitalism. I am aware of the irony, that I enter New Yorka refugeefrom my own dream.

Leaving home, getting lost, returning changed. My City of Yesterday reimagines a traditional narrative for modern times...echoes of Odysseus in the American suburbs. Its flawed hero is an ordinary, middle-aged man sinking "in chaos, in failure, in poetry," only to re-surface later, weakened but wiser. I read the signsthe way the ancientsread the constellations, always leading away from here.

I Sit At This Desk and Dream is a single poem in several sections. Each "note from a Sunday morning on Instagram" responds to an image on social media (a painting, a photo, an incantation). Individually, the notes are funny, sad, sexy, nostalgic. Together, they create a new self-portrait. I Sit At This Desk and Dream is a poem about seeing your life-past, present, perhaps future-scroll before your eyes.

Will Stark returns from war to a broken society struggling to make sense of defeat-a civilization in decline, an environment in ruins. After receiving a call from a stranger who has news about George Stark, the father Will never knew, Will drives to a distant suburb to see what, if anything, he can learn about his past. As Will pieces together his father's life, he creates a new life for himself, and an active role in the life of a struggling community, only to become a soldier once again. Jigsaw Men is the story of a broken past, a precarious present, and a future of worthy struggle.

All the Lonely American Roads is a poem about starting over. What do we take with us? What is worth saving? What is important to us as people with complicated lives-families, jobs, desires? Which lessons from the past, which stories, which myths? An interrelated series of lyrics, fragments, songs, and dialogues, it is a portrait of a man, and a culture, trying to find a new way forward. I leave to find my love again.I will scatter myself as I go.

A time after search engines but before social media. After the Cold War but before the Endless War. After Grunge but before whatever happened after Grunge. The final days of the old media and the birth of the new, when "the stolen beat was the new arms race." For a minute there, it seemed like something was happening. A poem about hope and loss at the end of the millennium.

Like all family albums, Sometimes I Still Pray is a collection of memories-stories, pictures, poems-captured for different reasons, in different ways, at different times in the writer's life and in the lives of his family members...a record stretching across five generations, from immigrant Brooklyn in the early 1900s to suburban New England in the early 2000s. These were my only tiesto a time before my memory, to days of tragedy, the origins of my story. All the back pages confirmthat I was cursed to bridge the generations.Now I feed their remnants to the fire.

Body Songs is a collection of poems and photographs exploring themes of love, attraction, and erotic fulfillment. It is a celebration of intimacy in word and image-from courtly romance to kink, and everything in between.

Parchment: A Prayer Quartet is a collection of five poems, each a yearning for spiritual renewal in a troubled age. Inspired by (but not beholden to) the outcasts, beats, and mystics of the American past, it is an urgent, lyric and sometimes-ironic plea for better angels. To do this now is insanity, I know, a prayer for a prayer-less century (so far), but is it crazier than relying on the knowledge of history? Is it crazier than denying all progress? It it crazier than preferring the darkness of the past?