SONGS FOR LEAVING (Gutter Snob Books) is out. I’m gonna hit the road to do a little book peddling & poetry reading. Might sling a song or two, who knows.
Thursday (1/12/23): Pages Bookshop (Detroit, MI) with Cal Freeman & Shawntai Brown.
Friday (1/13/23): Gathering Volumes (Perrysburg, OH) with Kerry Trautman.
Saturday (1/14/23): The Attic On Adams (Toledo, OH) with Child of the System-Jodie L Summers & Kay Renee.
Tuesday (1/17/23): Bokeh Lounge (Evansville, IN) with Joseph Fulkerson.
Sunday (2/5/23): Flywheel Brewing (Elizabethtown, KY) hosting their poetry open mic.
More dates tba.
Follow ascoomer dot com for updates.
SONGS FOR LEAVING, A.S. COOMER–SIGNED
$15 includes US shipping. *Cat not included.
$15.00
Buy the high-quality audiotracks & signed paperback at A.S. Coomer’s Bandcamp Page.
Songs for Leaving is the latest collection of poems from prolific writer and musician A.S. Coomer. “Be the damn after every God,” he advises, “. . . make a big stink.” Lots of great verbal pictography here, each piece distilled and presented in exact, precise language. Growing gardens of hope in the heart, and where else can we grow, after all, ache like bulb near bloom, hollowed out by a deeper need? With night blues looming over it all, as the televised sky screams the screech of bombs, as we viewers feign calm, numbed by numberless views of the same unfeeling broadcast, beholden to the lows by our spectation through thin hard glass walls of screens on our phones and computers, miles and miles of wires between us and the action, & here come the End Times, fa la la.
“Songs For Leaving is a phenomenal collection crackling gems of vast expansion when “you can’t live small enough to escape all light,” yet “trauma can’t be stolen.” Coomer’s brilliance radiates a live wire of infused turbulence and musicality into the searing myriad of his haunting poems. Absolutely mesmerizing and unstoppable! Get a copy! Inspiring and life-altering. LOVE!”
—Meg Tuite, author of White Van
”The wizened intricacy of Coomer leaps from the page, with lines like “…Understand something will always be lost/ In translation.” There is musicality in Songs For Leaving, the poet wending his path, attempting to make sense of the inherent seeming madness. These poems ache and break, trembling and their urgency is weighted with the human inescapability of life.”
—Robert Vaughan, author of Askew
“Songs for Leaving is so goddamned good that it transcends the genre of poetry and enters the realms of good fucking art. Coomer weaves melody and harmony into poetry so beautiful that a reader almost forgets they’re reading about war, erosion, climate change, love, life, loss, and the big bad nothing. Like all great maestros, he turns war into sonnets, and pain into hymns that make it all almost tolerable. This is what poetry is. What it’s supposed to be. Goddamn.”
—Dan Denton, author of $100-A-Week Motel
“A.S. Coomer’s poems trace the “receding stygian tide kept barely at bay,” but he’s not in the business of delineating spiritual doom and lived experience. This poetry seeks to invent new phrasings that we might utter or listen to as we “count the hours by the silt rings.” “Despite it all: / make, do, see / if you’re able” Coomer implores us. These Songs For Leaving are outboard lyrics engineered to propel us around liminal island, “greasy hullaballoos… electric fangs rending neon flesh.” I know Coomer’s readers will find this chapbook a welcome addition to his polymathic catalogue. It’s hard not to fall in.”
—Cal Freeman, author of Poolside at the Dearborn Inn
Categories: Literature, Music, Poem, Poetry, sale
A.S. Coomer 