THIS IS AN EXCERPT from the incomparable epic, DILLINGER, by Todd Moore. In the world of John Dillinger (and Moore), the Thompson sub-machine gun is our equivalent of the shaman’s stick, the bones flying in the air in Kubrick’s 2001, Lorca’s waltz with death in Granada. AKA, the Tommy Gun, the Chicago Typewriter, chopper or trench broom, the machine gun sleeps at the black heart of the American dream. Cinematic in scope, hypnotic when read, DILLINGER stands as a challenge to every other American long poem published in the last fifty years. Dillinger's Thompson is just a taste. With a cover by Danger. "Todd Moore’s DILLINGER cycle appears as a welcome and audacious suprise. It’s a mammoth, sprawling, obsessive vision of the Depression era’s most flamboyant bank robber and gunmen, Public Enemy No. 1. Written in the free -flowing tradition of Whitman and the Beats, the narrative is accessible, hard-edged, alternately moving and scary, and rich as any novel in its weave of event and character.
"Dillinger takes shape as a work of soaring ambition and single accomplishment--not to mention being a remarkable feat of creative concentration. In that sense, the cycle ranks with Ginsberg’s Howl and the late Thomas McGrath’s Letters to an Imaginary Friend as one of the premier long poems of our time. "With passion, biting style and a ruthless vision of the void, Todd Moore has fashioned a painstakingly pure and vivid piece of hard-boiled art--one work of poetry, I suspect, with a long and potent shelf life, and one well worth searching out." (by Grover Lewis, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 8-16-92)
