Andrew’s Comments (group member since Feb 08, 2009)

Andrew’s comments from the ZERO SUMMER KNITTING CIRCLE group.

Dear Knitting Circle Members,

Thanks so much for your interest in a knitting circle based loosely around the sophomore effort of an obscure poet. If/when you read Zero Summer, please spread the word about it. Ask your local library to purchase a copy. Or better yet, purchase a copy and then donate it to your local library after you've read it. Zero Summer was released by BlazeVOX [books:], a small, independent publisher in New York who does not have the marketing funds of a major publication house.

Thanks again. The reviews of Zero Summer so far have been very, very positive. I know you will enjoy reading it.

For me, it's not about making money- it's about making connections, starting the dialog.

With Warm Regards,

-Andrew

Demcak continues to blossom as an important poet with ZERO SUMMER, his newest collection of pieces of imagination married to craftsmanship. These poems define lust, desire, onanism, finding and feeling and losing love affairs, childhood longings and memories - the sum of a sensual being. Demcak's range is from the lyrical ('Vincent V. in 1993') to the raw ('Venus in Furs'). He offers the rare opportunity to share the struggles of writing poetry, as in 'Automated Response to Mark Strand': '…the poem is a permission/given away,'- and delves into current events - tragedies, disease, social injustices, world events that seem planets away until he stirs them into spells for the reader. Imagery such as this, and the countless other examples begging to be quoted from these fifty seven poems, create such rich atmospheres of beauty and urgency, and thoughts without horizon, that they seem to be coming from countless fertile minds instead of just one. Andrew Demcak has the gift and we are all richer for it.”

—Grady Harp

"ZERO SUMMER's skinny, sticky, cock-swaggering poems take 'bloody comfort' in Andrew Demcak's lubricated, literary longing, the bourbon 'sweet / with unimagined grief,' the very words 'laboring / over / the soup-bones of literature.' This is a book that will get under your fingernails."


—Randall Mann

“Spiralling electrically around a theme of longing, Demcak's newest work moves outward in arcs—from the sensual self, in erotic and familial relationship with the other ("my skin listening // still no accompanist: I can't kiss me!" )—to the writing and artistic self, the creative pursuit of spirit through form (God "an unflawed blackberry…rosettes of icing…the murdered and the living brightness")—to this spirit in the world and in other people ("O divine architect! / O quick-drying cement!"). His language is playful, charged, articulate and highly crafted—always with an introspective sense of humor and form. Full of music from Ellington to Schoenberg, full of heroes from Noah to Ginsberg, Demcak's poems are attuned to both absurdity and pathos, those extremes that lead the poet and the reader towards their "unimaginable" Zero Summer.”

—Nina Lindsay