Description
Book Synopsis"As adept working with the sonnet and sestina as with loose-fitting lines, Howard produces poems of great immediacy that stir with emotional depth. . . . [His] vision of our post-9/11 culture is offbeat, yet 'wisdomtight.'"—David Trinidad Eric Howard’s debut poetry collection reveals the secrets that bind office work to war, Gidget to the damned, the Bible to popular song, mythology to fact, and Los Angeles to Ovid. On a bicycle ride through heavy traffic, it versifies the last days of a failed pimp, gives a tarot reading to warplanes, and deciphers the hieroglyphics of lost empire.
Eric Howard is an LA-based poet and editor. His work has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Caveat Lector, Conduit, Gulf Stream Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Plainsong, The Sun, and in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond.
Trade Review"In this wry portrait of contemporary southern California, we read of ordinary life smashed up against the window of lives outrageously lived and risked.
Taliban Beach Party guides us through a gallery of characters such as Moira, the sex club’s ticket-taker; the surfer god Cupid; and Bacchus of the office. Howard’s various formal strategies liberate these figures from the margins and obscurities and give them feet with which to walk, voices with which to sing, and bodies with which to bang about and love."—
Ed Skoog "[L]ike William Carlos Williams, reincarnated as Johnny Depp, doing a gig as a tour guide for Dante." —Barbara Roether,
Cultural Weekly "
Taliban Beach Party kicks Moon Doggie’s ass and shoots the metropolitan tube alternative. Your TV is on fire, planes fly into the fiber optics, and madmen are delivered into the poet’s hand, where justice unfolds across the page and Cassandra has your rainbow in her hair. This book is a shindig where the wise office geek gets his Gidget and inherits the Selectric Olympus of a forty-hour workweek, singing this is how it ends, this is how it begins."—
S. A. Griffin "Eric Howard is a mixmaster of language, spinning mashups of history, songs, biblical references, and allusions filtered through an outsider’s view of the world. Howard gives voice to those whose dreams have not yet come true, including Daddy Moses, Office Venus, the drummer from Waxie Snatch, as well as the men who drop the bombs. Although many of Howard’s poems make us laugh, they continue to detonate long after we have read them."—
Terry Wolverton
