Barry Gifford is the author of more than 40 books, which have been published in twenty-eight languages. His work has been awarded by PEN, the NEA, the "Los Angeles Times, " and the "New York Times, ." His film credits include "Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts" and more.
It's like this: It's late at night, or very early in the morning,
and you're walking down an empty street, and everything is utterly
still and silent; and then you pass by an apartment building and
someone on the third floor has a window open, and you hear some
music playing, very softly. The music bounces off the walls of the
buildings and you can make out the tune, pure and intimate and
playing just for you. And that's what you get with Barry Gifford's
poetry. It's direct, tender, wry, and heartbreaking.
--Rob Christopher, Chicagoist Like Minerva Jones, the village poet
in Edgar Lee Masters' 1916 Spoon River Anthology, all-around writer
Barry Gifford croons out these poem-prose reflections in a
well-distilled voice that booms and whispers with life ... What
connects New York, 1960 to post-War 1916 USA and Barry Gifford's
21st century is the measure of his lyric, narrative breath.
--Al Young, former poet laureate of California Gifford sketches
marvelous characters as deftly as William Faulkner and animates
them in scene after scene of hilarious dialogue ... Barry Gifford
continues to be one of America's most original writers.
--Playboy Gifford, a master of the short story and nasty vignette,
can sum up in a few words the cruelty, horror, and crushing
banality that shape an entire life.
--New York Times Book Review Gifford's admirers can't be faulted
for imprecision. He's a moving target, as omnivorous as he is
prolific, having published poetry, novels, story collections,
memoirs, biographies of William Saroyan and Jack Kerouac, art
criticism, plays, screenplays, a libretto, and nonfiction
monographs about horse racing and the Chicago Cubs. Even this kind
of classification is inaccurate: his history of the Cubs is really
a memoir, his poems read like prose, his prose like poetry.
--New York Times Book Review
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