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Comments
on Willie Perdomo's book
Like
a dose of Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries, and
a Billie Holiday song with a Miguel Pinero
chaser, Willie Perdomo's long awaited follow-up to his
powerful debut is a sizzling cocktail of drug addiction,
love, recovery, and truth. The familiar Lexington Avenue
of East Harlem continues to be his Yoknapatawpha but
the world has become his lab in this collection of serious
prose and gunfire verse. These poems find room to depict
the change in urban scenery, the de-romanticization
of withdrawal, a homeless man's spin on empowerment
zones, the global humor of a drug run and the reflective
clarity of a train ride. As the poet declares in "Lexington
Avenue Prelude," "This is the face-to-face appointment
with the Department of Human Resources/That you can't
miss even if you tried."
Poet
Willie Perdomo’s latest book, "Smoking Lovely," makes
Latin Manhattan’s
neighborhoods sparkle like a Fourth of July night sky.
With muscular slanguage that’s funny and surreal, Perdomo
explores love and struggle. He makes readers stop uptown
and visit the forgotten --like the character Kriptonite,
a thug to some, but in Perdomo’s poem, a man who has
been in love and in trouble. A Nuyorican Pablo Neruda,
Perdomo finds a love poem’s pulse and takes it. From
"French Roast’s" syncopated sensuality to "Seesaw’s"
hard knocks --"I go up in smoke and come down in a nod"--
Perdomo makes a connection between getting high and
getting hurt. --
David Mills, NY POST, Oct 10, 2003.
Perdomo
is a necessary and insistent voice in the current American
literary scene, one that here forwards a hybrid medium
in which his -- and perhaps those of other spoken-word
artists -- experiences can be properly represented to
a larger public. Shelve this record like a book. --
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY (Dec. 2003)
In
Smoking Lovely, Perdomo turns back to the bittersweet.
Intimacy, irony, seduction and self-revelation are the
ink in this poet's pen … When Perdomo writers, you can
believe it to be so… -- Quarterly Black Review
of Books (Nov/Dec 2003)
"Smoking
Lovely sings to both the eyes and ears, placing
oral and visual patterns in dramatic tension with one
another..And the pleasure offered by this vibrant collection
is precisely the pleasure of watching and hearing the
polyphonic performance in vibrant poetic terms. "
-- Manu Samriti Chander, American Book Review
July-Aug, 2004
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"Perdomo
isn't talking about the self-imposed exile of an artist
but a whole community that's been disfranchised against
it's will. His tie to that community is intergenerational,
and he can move from the street talk of his peers to
old-fashioned Latin lyrical faster than Celia Cruz can
turn on her stilettos." -- The Nation
"Smoking
Lovely, Willie Perdomo's second volume of poetry,
confirms his hard won place in American letters. Addiction,
poverty, class and racial identity, love and recovery
are examined with a devastating and streetwise voice,
marked with irrefutable artistic integrity and craftsmanship.
These poems sing, howl, and heal with a sad and searing
wisdom akin to genius. Smoking Lovely is destined
to become not just one of the best books of the year
but of the decade." -- Sapphire, author of Push
and Black Wings & Blind Angels
"Willie
Perdomo is an electric poet. His poems crackle with
energy. The poet knows his beloved barrio, what to celebrate
and what to condemn. He also has the courage to confront
his own demons. There is raw pain in this voice, and
much more: humor, irony, music, intelligence." --
Martin Espada, author of City of Coughing and
Dead Radiators and Alabanza
“Willie
Perdomo introduces crack to poetry with the genuine
craftiness of the gentleman who presents his ex-lover
to his wife. What's said carries as much weight as what
isn't. Each stanza looks you squarely in the eyes and
holds the stare a moment longer until it is pressed
into your mind that rock bottom is no different than
sky high.” -- Saul Williams, author of She
and award-winning actor in Slam
“This
book like all good volumes of poetry is an articulation
of the poet's and the poem's sense of belonging. These
poems belong in this book.” -- Paul Beatty, author
of Joker, Joker, Duece and The White Boy Shuffle.
“Whether
we’re talking Puerto Rico or the US, the Poetry Society
of America or the corner of 123rd Street and Lexington
Avenue, there is no poet alive who can match the lyrical
intelligence, ferocious wit and searching humanity of
Willie Perdomo. Perdomo is the hurricane we all write
home about. He is to the word what lightning is to the
sky. He is Langston and Hector (Lavoe) and Whitman and
Mír. He is the heart in struggle with itself. Perdomo
writes damnation as though it were heaven and breaks
the ordinary -- a mother calling her children home,
a weed-trip to Brixton, heartbreak -- into gold. He’s
the Puerto Rican diaspora’s unofficial poet laureate
and what he knows about being of color, being between
languages, being poor, being a man, being in trouble,
could save your life.” -- Junot Díaz, author
of Drown
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