Reviews

Mustering What's Left - Selected & New Poems - 1976-2017

• The publication of Roger Aplon's "Mustering What's Left: Selected & New Poems 1976-2017" allows us to experience the evolution of a major American poet whose work has always been on the cutting edge. Aplon's poetry is not for the faint of heart; he wants to provide a visceral experience, and the reader is frequently taken on wild, lurching roller coaster rides through the darker places of human experience.  At other times he strikes a sudden blow to the solar plexus. And yet, there are also poems of great tenderness. The imagery and language is frequently shocking, bizarre, disorienting, hauntingly poignant, and suffused with themes of loss, guilt, the evanescence of human relationships,  brutality, loneliness, and the relentless march toward death. 
  A hallmark of all of Aplon's work is his utter fearlessness (the book cover of a man running with the bulls is very apt).  He inhabits a wide range of protagonists with authentic voices, allowing the richness of his unconscious processes to emerge. Free association is tempered by his poetic gift.  He is willing to face anything, and punctures our tendency to deny.  The challenge of seeing is frequently depicted in his use of the symbol of the eye.  Eyes are often present—at times damaged, single, or absent in a face.
  Throughout the decades of Aplon's poetry, he has sustained a rhythmic drive, improvisatory quality, and boundary stretching  that has a close affinity to jazz.  And perhaps, as it is often the case for maturing jazz musicians, Roger Aplon's evolution has involved an ever- deepening understanding of the geology and expanse of the terrain he is exploring.
  With the publication of "Mustering What's Left" Unsolicited Press has fully accomplished their stated mission of finding "astonishing and vibrant poetry."
  Denny Zeitlin 
  
• Roger Aplon's poems never disappoint. Poems of history and mystery. Poems of the lyrical and the minimal. This poetry, gleaned from forty years of writing and publishing, does something remarkable, it yields a language that is archetypal, deepseated in the brain waves, something from cave walls and sides of mountains. It provides a snake chain of images, rhythms, ideas, stories. It is the pulse of what a poem should be. An experience. An innovation. A transcendence. Something that gets in the blood. Something that leaves you transformed. It's akin to one of Aplon's metaphors: wrestling alligators. It's about the body. It's about the skin. It's about the senses. It's about struggle. It's about the shift of power from individual to individual.

  Tony Moffeit
• Take the titles these poems come from: Stiletto, By Dawn’s Early Light At 120 Miles Per Hour, It’s Mother’s Day, Barcelona Diary, The Man With His Back To The Room, Intimacies, Escapades, After Goya, Improvisations, Homage To A Widow, It’s Only TV, and Improvisations – Poetic Impressions From Contemporary Music and you get the sensation of movement, the journey away and the return to reflect and record.  “I wonder how long it will take/ to walk this block with its 17 people that I know,” and we take the walk with him from neighborhood out into a wider radius on each circle of the block, and as the circles get farther from home “I listened for some echo of a cantor’s lilting/ chant & murmurs of those great debates which shaped the visions of/ Kabbalah, today/ there was only the clamor of gulls chasing the tide.”  This is a strong collection by a poet whose work has held its vigor through the decades. 

  Kyle Laws

• It’s quite a ride you take us on across the decades in your work–and it feels like that: an extended road trip through many places, some familiar, some foreign, and with many people, some familiar and inviting, some we wouldn’t particularly want to know, led by a tour guide with a keen eye and keen empathy for what he’s witnessing. I hope you will take it as a compliment, as I mean it to be, when I say I’m reminded of Anthony Bourdain’s vision. Here is an observer with a keen passion for life in all its variety, who drinks it in. Your collection celebrates that passion. I feel very much at ease in these poems, even through the most intimate moments, and there are plenty of those ("A Dressing Gown" is one of my favorite of the erotic poems). Some writers would make me feel like a voyeur or like they are asking some reaction from me, and I’m not sure what they want. I don’t have that feeling at all reading your work. Just the opposite. I relax, I trust the poet; he wants to show me what’s going on in his world without asking anything from me except that I pay attention. Sometimes–in some of the narrative poems--I am not altogether sure what is going on exactly, how we’ve gotten here, even where we are, or why, but I am caught up in the narrative, nonetheless, intrigued by it, as in "October 14, 2000." I don’t need all the light switches turned on. The mystery enhances the tension. I think good poetry works inferentially. It asks the reader to participate in the poem. Your work does that. There is also, what should I call it, a clarity of voice. Too many poets–and prose writers, too, for that matter–throw up a metaphoric mesh like a net they want to catch you in, want to overwhelm you with their oh-so-clever wordplay. Not so here; you are working to achieve lucidity. Images are chosen not to impress but to clarify.  On top of all this, I much enjoy the bawdiness and sense of humor in your work.

• William Luvaas

• Latest book: Welcome to Saint Angel

  Poetry so consistently up close and tight you can taste it....

  Bob Crothers
• As you turn a page there is always a surprise, always startling; raw realism, exhilarating exuberance of cascades of words – to me, a waterfall of sound words make.  Heartwrenching honesty of emotions, of life experience, of what he sees, hears, feels.  This publication is a masterful recap of this artist’s creations.  Astonishing wordcraft!  

  Michael Lebovitch
• When I say Roger Aplon's poetry is sensational, I mean just that.  The reader sees, hears, feels and tastes.  The poet's delight, alarm, fear, anger, wild imaginings invade your head. heart and gut!  
  

  Carol Brennan carolbrennan.net

Improvisations - Poetic Impression From Contemporary Music

 Michael Lebovitch  . . . April 2016

Music and poetry are such good therapeutic resources and Roger definitely captures both of these in his book. I found myself completely glued to this book, the author's voice and message is very powerful and it definitely got my attention! I received this book in exchange for a honest review. I will be using this book for not only my research in recreational therapy, but also for my own pure enjoyment. This author definitely keeps his audience glued to his poems.

TDC – Book Reviews (5/2016)

It's Only TV

A new Roger Aplon book of poetry is always an event to be celebrated. And so I am celebrating IT’S ONLY TV, Aplon’s selected poems, 2005-2011. Roger Aplon never disappoints. His Surrealistic stories. His astonishing use of language. His superb irony. All are in play in the title poem, “It’s Only TV.” And what a beautiful metaphor! When reality and fantasy are intertwined, one inseparable from the other, what better metaphysical humor than to say, “Let it go...It’s only TV.” Aplon’s poems read like Surreal reality TV. The section “It’s Only TV” gives us an old man in the poem “Across the Street” where “Nothing is as it seems.” The section also gives us “The Man Who Lives Underground” “excavating vein-by-vein, what’s left of his salvation – his brief refuge & his/silent hell.” And also “The Part of The Gypsy Girl” which “will be played by her twin, the one with one brown eye & one blue.”

Along with his Surreality TV, Aplon’s lines are individual poems in themselves. Aphorism builds on aphorism to give us a story which is both told and interpreted by the reader, or re-created by the reader. “The Woman Who Sleeps With The Devil” is a good example. “The Usual Suspect” is another favorite. Aplon’s prose poem, “I Saw Her Through The Mist” is incredible. It’s like a novel told in several lines. The wonderful thing about a Roger Aplon book is experiencing a rare adventure: finding poems you can really get inside of.

                   Tony Moffeit: Editor, Writer & Poet - March 2013

Intimacies

This is an amzing collection.  It illustrates Aplon's creativity and imagination and no one, absolutely no one has a voice like his.

Not for Everyone . . . it's anything but mainstream, but those who do find it and are willing to turn themselves over to the logic of these stories, and the wonder therein, are in for a memorable ride!

               - Judy Reeves: Author

               A Writer's Book of Days

The Man With His Back To The Room

The Man with His Back to the Room is a collection of poems that captivates the reader with its unique style of free verse and touch of avant-garde.

"The arms that wave from the windows are black& the cats that roam the street are black & there are black beards & black hands & black market toys& you’ve blackened the windows & shut my eyes…”

Down to earth and expressive, these selected poems bring reality and life (which reflect his Barcelona setting) through dynamic images and language.

“The man in the gray hat
has a pawn ticket in his pocket & a memory of suicide.

In winter he carries a gun & news of religious sacrifice.”

For lovers of modern free verse with a fresh approach—you can’t go wrong with this one.

                   Wayne Adam - Curl Up With A Good Book

For me the "daybook" pieces are like a surreal diary of anguished grief. Some of the images almost make one cringe. Very, very powerful. . . Many of the others . . . are a  descent into an inferno that makes Dante's journey look like a summer picnic.

                  Ron Offen - Editor & Publisher: Free Lunch

                  Last Book: Off-Target

Many of these poems deal with painful and shadowy material.

Some feel improvised and pulled toward the disparate and wild. Yet Aplon unifies them with a wave-like pulse, often stretched and held, an audible unevenness that comes alive as one reads.

The images don't slow and regard themselves; rather, they keep moving, like field binoculars surveying a scene.  Phrases that end with the & (the ampersand) push forward with renewing energy—the way a dream unfolds by attaching new, more complicating strangeness.

And, while some of these poems relate to, and delight in, the tangential, they don’t appear random. I especially like those that turn and discover themselves and their meanings at the end—like the exquisite title poem.  This is a book to treasure.                          

              - Thomas Larson - Author: The Memoir and the

            Memoirist: Reflections on a New Literary Form

Ohio University Press / 2007

Barcelona Diary
". . . a read tour de force of craft and care, with an ear honed to the sharpness of sounds and an eye absolutely focused."
"...a marvelous book of marvels and luminous moments...a flowering of intelligence and experience."
".[Aplon] gives us the 'place' of the place, so that it becomes a world in us."
                 - Joe Stroud
                   Last book: Below Cold Mountain 

". . . you can open it to any page and find something unique and evocative...the book is a classic."
"I just opened it to #80 'Albrecht Durer: An Exhibition' and find the piece to be incredibly provocative: a creative writing teacher could use [it] as a beautiful model."
                 - Tony Moffeit
                   Last book: Billy the Kid & Frida Kahlo

"Its vigor and range so engage me . . . in proximity, or taken together, they [these 'entries'] form a kind of 'Song of Myself,' a grand forum that contains observations, feelings, memories and their interpretations - [all] influenced by [its] music."
          - Merrill Leffler
          Poet, Editor, Publisher & Co-Founder of Dryad Press

It's Mother's Day 
"Poems like...'The Woman Whose Skin's' represent some of the most engaging of Aplon's work. They borrow certain elements of primitive mythologies, and so doing, take one to levels of intellectual and poetically formal excitement that one always wishes for in writing of any kind, but especially in poetry."
". . . there is life in these poems. It's an eventful ride from beginning to end.  The detours are compelling ('O Yeah!), the tolls worth paying ('I Carry the Dead'), the rewards genuine ('Means')."
". . . poetically dynamic, it leaves one, ultimately, spinning [and] that's the idea."
                 - Mike Amato, Editor: No Exit
                   Winter 1998

By Dawn's Early Light at 120 Miles per Hour 
"A homage to the power of the imaginative mind."
"There is a playfulness with the language, a reality in which art and experience are inseparable pieces of an aesthetic."
"The book is a symphony of Americana."
                 - Shelby Stephenson
                   The Pilot
                   Southern Pines, North Carolina  

". . . the single most striking fact about this book is the range of its voice."
". . . themes of destruction, survival, transformation, and escape."
". . . the danger of By Dawn's Early Light is that the poems are so seamless, so carefully composed, that the reader will be insulated from the violence that lies (along with love) at the heart of Aplon's universe."
". . . there is a tremendous kinship with and affection for the reader."
                 - Edward Smallfield  
                   Small Press Review
                   San Francisco

Stiletto
"Lust and love to save the best in us (the life in us) from the economic, military and legal systems we die from."
". . . tough exactness about the mixed pain/pleasure of this survival life."
". . . a sense of truth, unglamourized menace, intensifying lust/love/life and truth = Stiletto."
"Admiration for the book."                        
                 - Milton Kessler
                   State University of New York at Binghamton
                   Department of English  

"In Stiletto we encounter an art based in head on collision."
"As with all good jazz, these poems put you in strange places, and the only true measure is the music as it passes through you.  I recommend this book to everybody, but don't blame me if your own language tastes strange after you read it."
". . . some of the best political-surrealist writing of the sixties and early seventies."
                 - Edward Smallfield
                   Small Press Review
                   San Francisco

"Aplon, who has a particular gift for enjambing images and using line-ends as devices to modulate velocity, is primarily concerned with commonplace items, which makes this book somehow deceptive; the poems work almost mnemonically; one remembers how they 'feel' much more than what they say.  Stiletto represents a poetic maturity, almost a phrophesy.  Read it."
                 - Denis Boyles
                   North East Rising Sun
                   Cherry Valley Editions