Machiavelli’s Backyard
“We are radical practitioners of right thinking,
determined to destroy Western Civilization. We
must step back to move forward: first go the arts
and the Decorations, then the courts, the laws
and institutions. By the time we’re through,
they’ll be nothing left but vaginal jelly
and sawed-off shotguns.”
Some of these poems are prosaic, some disturbing, some out-and-out hilarious: I like the dark sardonic tone and exquisite vernacular of gallows humor that popped right off the page. David Lohrey commands an arresting, hard-won deadpan syntax entirely his own. He can be biting, toothy, sardonic and often ambiguous. I love the casual acerbic tone. He makes me think of “Dover Beach” and Jonathan Swift. He is a deadly serious (and skilled) poet, who happens also to be a very funny man. Charles Bukowski comes to mind. It is a poetry of outrage, a poetry of sadness, and a poetry of laughter. Reading “Machiavelli’s Backyard” is like being invited to a garden party in a Walmart parking lot.
Available at Amazon.com, Amazon.com.uk, and the Book Depository
Paperback, 106 pages/Published September 1st 2017 by Sudden Denouement Publishing
David Lohrey is from Memphis, where he grew up, and now lives in Tokyo, where he teaches and writes for local travel magazines. He graduated from UC Berkeley and then moved to LA where he lived for over 20 years.
Internationally, his poetry can be found in Otoliths, Stony Thursday Anthology, Sentinel Quarterly, and Tuck Magazine. In the US, recent poems have appeared in Poetry Circle, FRiGG, Obsidian, and Apogee Journal. His fiction can be read in Crack the Spine, Dodging the Rain, and Literally Stories.
David’s The Other Is Oneself, a study of 20th-century literature, was published in 2016, while his first collection of poetry, Machiavelli’s Backyard, was released in September 2017. He is a member of the Sudden Denouement Collective.
Sudden Denouement Publishing 