Starving Romantic
Vincent James Perrone
PRAISE FOR STARVING ROMANTIC
“Starving Romantic is a major poetry debut from this young Detroit poet. With the earthy heart of Philip Levine and the inventiveness in language and form of e e cummings, this book is a treasure to behold”. - M.L. Liebler, author of the award winning I Want to Be Once
“Perrone’s poems brilliantly crack open the wheezy engine that drives so many of our desires to journey toward homes both real and implied, metaphorical and visceral, dreamed and invoked.” - Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost
“A meditation on finitude, contingency, and desire, the personae are caught between Greyhound bus stops in a landscape of doubt. Restless, unattached, yet self-possessed and wise, the voices that emerge in the poems are resolute.” - Caroline Maun, author of The Sleeping and What Remains
“These are beautiful, real-life poems in language that’s just the right amount of music and horror, a set of dream poems and surreal memories and desires from the raw, present moment." - Douglas Cole, author of Bali Poems and Western Dream
“This collection did much more than make the romantic in me starve—it fed my sense of exploration.” - Garrett Dennert, author of Wounded Tongue
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The fumes of crowded Greyhound buses, a Floridian coast visited by Father Time, a woman with a penchant for birds and elevators—what is the substance of humility?
Written in three sections, Starving Romantic explores themes of loss, family, home, and love through a hyperreal lyricism. The backdrops are often the forgotten Midwest, the sprawling landscapes of Detroit, and the anonymous house, complete with porch and backyard.
Starving Romantic lives in chaos, between its own conflicted nature. A celebration of turbulence, romance, and youth and the lingering pain that it brings with it.
Review in The Big Smoke
Review in THE POETRY QUESTION
Review in decomP
Review by Jon R. Meyers
Release Event Photos at The Forge in Detroit, MI
Photos by Michael Kitchen
Advance Praise for Starving Romantic
Perrone’s poems brilliantly crack open the wheezy engine that drives so many of our desires to journey toward homes both real and implied, metaphorical and visceral, dreamed and invoked. In this cracking open, Perrone reveals such an electric disappointment, the dependence of longing on close examination, and a seized, if still revivable, Midwestern kind of heart.
- Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost
Starving Romantic is a brilliant debut. A meditation on finitude, contingency, and desire, the personae are caught between Greyhound bus stops in a landscape of doubt. Restless, unattached, yet self-possessed and wise, the voices that emerge in the poems are resolute. Like Michigan weather, we can’t know our internal seasons, either, but it is “good / to be/ anything at all.”
- Caroline Maun, author of The Sleeping and What Remains
Vincent James Perrone’s first book Starving Romantic is a major poetry debut from this young Detroit poet. With the earthy heart of Philip Levine and the inventiveness in language and form of e e cummings, this book is a treasure to behold.
- M.L. Liebler, author of the award winning I Want to Be Once
These are beautiful, real-life poems in language that’s just the right amount of music and horror, a set of dream poems and surreal memories and desires from the raw, present moment.
- Douglas Cole, author of Bali Poems and Western Dream
Vincent James Perrone’s Starving Romantic time and again tilts the world on its axis, investigates the degree of said tilt, and then with precision offers to the reader moments that are at once universal and intimate. This collection did much more than make the romantic in me starve—it fed my sense of exploration.
- Garrett Dennert, author of Wounded Tongue
ISBN: 978-1-948687-02-7 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-948687-03-4 (paperback)