The Long Way Home by Leonard Gontarek

Leonard Gontarek is a Whitmanic visionary: in one moment he’s chanting incantations; in the next, he’s out in the street making sense of his American moment. No matter his angle of approach, in his vision Gontarek sees us with devastating clarity. Yet, we are drawn toward this seering vision because he expresses it with disarming sincerity. Which is to say, he tells it like it is and we can’t help but agree. With The Long Way Home, this poet’s poet has crafted a tour de force.
Iain Haley Pollock
author of Ghost, Like a Place and Spit Back a Boy

What is it with Leonard Gontarek and cats? What is it with coats, car parts, with parties across the river? What is it with Katy Perry, what is it with Donald Barthleme, with Breughel snapping at us? What is it with fathers? With mothers? With house-painters, their ladders, what is it with the American light dropping like lumber? I say let it be and let it be praise. Let it be a song, or a moan, or a two-foot walkie-talkie ch-ch-ch-ing into the night. And let it be, all ye who enter, your face given back by this shining cup of darkness.

Kate Northrop
author of cuntstruck and Things Are Disappearing Here

Gontarek's enthusiasm and imagination pour through poem after poem: surprising juxtapositions and fragments from Krishnamurti and other meditative guides and philosophers show a wide range of experiences and objects in a kind of praise song.

Sean Singer
author of Discography and Honey & Smoke

Leonard Gontarek’s is an elegant and important voice; he is an “unacknowledged legislator of the world” if there ever was one.

Christina Cook
author of A Strange Insomnia

“No doubt Italo Calvino would find Gontarek’s poems exemplary.”

A.V. Christie
author of More Here Than Light

Leonard Gontarek is the author of seven books of poems, including Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket, Shiva. His poems have appeared in Field, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, Fence, Poetry Northwest, American Poetry Review, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, and The Best American Poetry (edited by Paul Muldoon). He coordinates Peace/Works, Poetry In Common, Philly Poetry Day, hosts The Green Line Reading & Interview Series, and is Poetry Consultant for Whitman at 200: Art and Democracy. He conducts the poetry workshop: Making Poems That Last. His poem, 37 Photos From The Bridge, selected by Alice Quinn, was a Poetry winner for the Big Bridges MotionPoems project and the basis for the award-winning film sponsored by the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.
http://movingpoems.com/2015/10/thirty-seven-photos-from-the-bridge-by-leonard-gontarek/

Book Information:

· Paperback: 472 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-377-5