Roger Armbrust was national news editor of NYC's Back Stage magazine, taught writing at NYU, edited books on national social issues, and fathered a remarkable artist. He currently serves as co-curator of the online journal The Clyde Fitch Report: The nexus of arts and politics. His other books of poetry include How to Survive and The Aesthetic Astronaut.
Rhapsodic and radiant, visceral and incandescent, Roger Armbrust
revels in the sonnet; he crafts his fourteen lines until they
achieve rhythmic fluidity. The sublime musicality of his ear is
everywhere on display, and his use of assonances such as "horns of
Asian water ox--notched" strikes the listening reader as not only
surprising but inevitable. Like Shakespeare's dark lady, Armbrust
addresses a mysterious "love." Whether in the poet's bed,
Manhattan's Union Square, Aix-En Provence, or at Earth's
core-mantle of 4,000 degrees Celsius, each view is a marvel of
intimacy. In Oh, Touch Me There the subject matter ranges wildly
from the cedar waxwing to the "soft, pink chickpea" of "Clitoris."
Armbrust dares to echo not only Shakespeare in his masterful iambic
pentameter but Catullus in the grittiness that explodes lustily
from his pen. This is gorgeous, explosive poetry.--Stephanie
Dickinson "Skidrow Penthouse"
This stylish galaxy of love sonnets could only be crafted by a poet
who has won and lost at love many times and co-habited with love's
ghosts for long periods, enabling him to acquire first-hand
knowledge of "the feeling of stars dancing," as he puts it in one
of these 14-liners. To this poet, sexual love equals spiritual
love, and spiritual love is nothing less than boundless, arising
out of the most unlikely earth-bound circumstances and stretching
into the "swirling liquid sums of the universe." As Armbrust
writes: "It doesn't take much for each/gesture to create a
universe..." Armbrust's is book worth reading many times.--Tom
Tolnay "Birch Brook Press www.birchbrookpress.info"
"Whether Armbrust's subject is surgery or angels, his language and
vision--while expressed in an earthly lexicon--are focused on the
life of the spirit. Armbrust's love poems are not ethereal,
however, but rooted in real experience, Armbrust's one hundred-plus
sonnets incite passion and introspection, so that the collection
makes an inspired lover's gift."--Raymond Hammond, Editor, The New
York Quarterly "The New York Quarterly"
"Armbrust's contemporary sonnets plunge righ to the core of both
the matter and the reader." --Raymond Hammond, Editor, The New York
Quarterly
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