Gnarly Thumbs

"In a media saturated world, what are we to make of all the language that threatens to drown us in an atmospheric river of ubiquitous advertisements, nonstop news, corporate lingo, and endless commentary from everyone with an opinion on anything? We risk ceasing to really even hear the readymade phrases that circulate with insidious viral insinuation - or worse, we begin to parrot them. But if you're Noah Berlatsky you make it into poetry. In whiplash collages precisely attuned to idiom, collocation, and euphemism, Berlatsky scrambles the very elements meant to lubricate frictionless utterance. As he says: "we are conquering everything that is not happening, and we get right in there at the mute button that we deserve."

-Craig Dworkin, author of Helicography (Punctum, 2021)

"Have you ever entered a dark room and turned on the light and saw dozens of things scurry around in every direction? Our world is that room, this book is that light, and these poems are those things. Noah Berlatsky's sonnets are quick, hungry, obscene, frightening, and alive. "Paint prosperity. Photograph the opposite. This is Art / Garfunkel on the bridge over heaven's stentorian schmaltz." You may feel shaken or disturbed along the way, but rest assured: you're in good hands with Gnarly Thumbs."

-Jason Heroux, author of Hard Work Cheering Up Sad Machines (Mansfield Press, 2016)

A sonnet is an old space but you can put anything in it. What's in your spam folder? What's in that fashion magazine? Junk mail, junk mail, abandoned art book, self-help gibberish, black metal song title, tech bro burp, social media glut and sure maybe bits and plops of poetry. Gnarly Thumbs is a shot of bourbon chased with a mouthful of gravel-smooth where it shouldn't be and jagged where it counts. It is nano-sauce, flowing back and forth in the melting plot like carrots passing through a donkey. It is your words too, so what are you waiting for? Dig your thumbs into some whirling worms today!