“These poems display great range in terms of style, but what unifies them is their rugged, unflagging commitment to scoring the human experience, to identifying that underlying musical chord in all its sadness, horror, whimsy, and beauty.”
–Michael Meyerhofer, author of What To Do If You’re Buried Alive
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
A quiet urgency energizes David DiSarro’s poems in I Used to Play in Bands. His language is crisp, as in the opening lines of the title poem: “There were always / sad women, / striped socks, tattooed / names of ex-husbands, / strained against / low cotton tops.” He writes long sinuous sentences, exquisite and encompassing, and he has a penchant for the single-sentence poem—there are five in I Used to Play in Bands, each so gracefully written that we’re carried along toward that moment when, as in “Self-Portrait,” “the light and shadows, / . . . run along / and recede, / pull back / from the eyelids / of an elongated, / metallic sky.”
–Jeffery Mock, author of Ruthless
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
“Poems in David DiSarro’s I Used to Play in Bands are memorable because they are physical and remind us to think of people who might otherwise be forgotten like sad women in “striped socks, whose tattooed names of ex-husbands, strained against low cotton tops.” Vivid detail about billboards that “exercise” the eyes and of bodies that are “marked biohazard” cause poems to glow, shift and blaze with a passion for being, for a life lived fully. What other poet has written a poem about skateboarding at 33 to show how the spirit stays alive in spite of being contained in an aging body? One particularly moving poem is Full Count which details older men trying to recapture past glory on a baseball field who “lumber around the bases, bellies heavy.” What unites this intense and compelling collection is DiSarro’s knowledge that, in spite of the complexity of being human, we cannot allow passion and laughter to get swallowed by a world that threatens to drown out music, to drown out song.”
–Vivian Shipley, author of All of Your Messages Have Been Erased
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
“In this first, and accomplished collection by David DiSarro, the poet conveys his keen sense of surprise with nature and the world at large. Whether he is writing about a drunken ramble, or the way fire ants creeping up his leg can provide unexpected insight into death and human nature, DiSarro surprises the reader with his spare lines and deft touch, and how much they can evoke.”
–Doug Holder, author of Portrait of An Artist as a Young Poseur: Boston 1973-1984
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
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