Description
Aswirl with waking dreams and phantom memories,
The Late Parade is a triumph of poetic imagination.
To write about one thing, you must first write about another. In Adam Fitzgerald's debut collection, readers discover forty-eight poems that yoke together tones playful and elegiac, nostalgic and absurd. Fitzgerald's shape-shifting inspirations "beckon us to join an urban promenade" (McLane) with a multiplicity of chimerical stops: from the unreal cities of Dubai to the former Soviet Union, from Nigerian spammers and the Virgin Mary to Dr. Johnson and Cat Power.
"The glory of this volume is the long title poem, which carries the primal vision of Hart Crane into a future that does not surrender the young poet's love of the real," writes Harold Bloom. Mash-ups of litanies, monologues and odes, these poems spring from a modernist landscape filled with madcap slips of tongue, innuendo, archaisms and everyday slang. Though Fitzgerald's lines often hallucinate meanings that feel open-ended, they never ignore the traditional pleasures of poetic craft and memory, their music an ambient drone--part Technicolor, part nitrous oxide.
Even so, what glues these fantasies together is more than the charm of the maddeningly chameleon rhetoric. Fitzgerald's sonorous voice is unabashedly that of a love poet's: melancholic, baroque and visionary. The Late Parade is a testament to the powers of confusion, which may disguise our sense of loss but offer in return that eloquent tonic known as poetry. As Richard Howard writes, "When the new poet turns up the heat, he gives us just the necessary outrages which make us understand what we never knew we could say."
About the Author
Adam Fitzgerald is a writer, director, filmmaker, and content creator whose work has been recognized with an Emmy Nomination, "Critic's Picks" from The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, TimeOut Chicago and TimeOut New York, "Best of the Year" nods in The Advocate Magazine and The Contra Costa Times, a Jeff Award Nomination, and San Francisco Bay Area Critics Award nominations. His writing has been published by the Huffington Post and Thomson Reuters Foundation & Openly and his short film, Occupy Me (director/writer) has been viewed more than one million times on YouTube. Adam directed RESISTANCE RADIO for Man in the High Castle (Amazon Studios) which was nominated for a Creative Arts Emmy Award and received two Silver and three Bronze Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, and the short film Dividends, which won "Best Director" at the New York Film Awards.
Reviews
Fitzgerald's voice is a new and welcome sound in the aviary of contemporary poetry... His is a third way, a poetry that is neither sealed off from human ears nor bent solely on pleasing them. In a word, his poems are drunk on both word and allusion and are therefore doubly tipsy... The result is a poetry as lush as any of Keat's odes, as textured as a corridor in the Louvre... No wonder this was the first debut collection acquired by W.W. Norton's resurrected Liveright division, which helped define modernism in America in the 1920s... Reading 'The Late Parade' wasn't like listening to a mountain speak. It was more like listening to the earth laugh.--David Kirby
The Late Parade by Adam Fitzgerald may be the beginning of a great career.--Harold Bloom
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