Frost Heaves:  Poems 2008
by Richard Milazzo.

With drawings by William Anastasi and a foreword by the author.
First edition paperback: September 2013.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
80 pages, with a 2-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white drawing of the author by William Anastasi, New York City, October 15, 2008, on the frontispiece, and reproductions of 10 graphite drawings on paper.
8 x 5.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy.
ISBN-13:  978-88-905385-3-7.
Published by Libri Canali Bassi, Cumiana, Italy, 2013.

RETAIL PRICE: $20.00 (includes postage and handling)

Except for a handful of poems written in Paris and Geneva, Frost Heaves:  Poems 2008 by Richard Milazzo, was written entirely in the U.S. – in Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Missouri, South Dakota, California, and, of course, New York – which is in itself unusual for this author, who has always felt more at home in the larger world of Western and Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle and Far East, North Africa, and Central America.  He explains:  “Chinatown used to be a part of New York City, and of many other cities in America and throughout the world.  Every big city had a Chinatown.  Now it is our cities that have become a small part of Chinatown.  A global Chinatown.”  This new reality has contributed to the production of such books as Small China Moon, With Grass Ropes We Dragged the World to Her in Wooden Boats:  Poems of Jordan, Syria and Egypt, Stone Dragon Bridge, Where Angels Arch Their Backs and Dogs Pass Through.  Perhaps not so enigmatically, the author continues:  “If you’ve ever driven in Vermont and New Hampshire, you would have noticed especially during the winter road signs that read FROST HEAVES, the cold, snow, and ice causing the pavement to contract and buckle.  Perhaps there is a metaphor in that.  Of course, the allusion to Robert Frost in the title, both the swerve toward and away from him, is intentional.”

Thus, it would not be wrong to ask, what does this poet’s America look like?  It appears to be lined with “little more than rust,” “palm trees bleeding in the sky,” “teeth shattering like rogue stars” – with “poets no longer held” and “a deepening prayer” that has nothing to do with any god or religion.  “A history of darkness hidden inside the smallest seed,” but a seed, nonetheless.  For solace he turns often to nature in the form of an erotic dimension, abstract and louche, elevated and lowly, transcendent even and unrelentingly marginalized.  However, in the end, it is only the ghosts and shadows of satyrs and nymphs that populate these feral but outré states of mind and being, reflective, it would seem, of a country brinking on self-abandonment – not unlike North Dakota, which has now turned to fracking to ‘salvage’ itself, a bleak and internecine salvation if ever there was one.  By comparison, the author’s by now symbolic, if not mythic, “black branch in winter” offers us something like the hint of scant rejuvenation within a merciless world denuded of all but the most mercenary of values.

The author has previously collaborated with the Italian painter and sculptor Alessandro Twombly, the German sculptor Abraham David Christian, and the Italian photographer Carlo Benvenuto.  The drawings accompanying this volume of poetry are by William Anastasi, one of the progenitors of conceptual art in America.