Customer Reviews

Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems

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First of all, I am extremely proud to have the supreme honor of being the first to review this anthology.

I stumbled across Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't" (I Sailed with Magellan) in my university's Short Story class, and absolutely fell in love with the prose. His writing is like nothing I've ever read before, though he has been compared in to Richard Carver in some circles, and called a Polish-Kerouac in others.

"Streets" immediately became one of my most cherished poetry anthologies (I loved it so much I bought a signed first edition). It is hypnotic, haunting, riveting, and I recommend it to all poetry readers who are interested in modern poetry and free-verse style.

"Anti-Memoir" is perhaps the best poem of the set:

"Tonight, follow the mute street singer / Unimpended by sight, he leads/down passageways you thought deleted, / diction stripped like stolen cars, / barricades of syntax broken by emotion, / sighs of plaster dust, the haze / of white space between words. Don't pause / for punctuation, here, a comma / of indecision elides into a coma, / and, years later, one wakes / to the interminable typing of rain / in a hotel where transients waste / money good for alcohol's blue flame/on sleep. Outside, the homeless / congregate while you continue to rent / all the rooms you've left to behind, / addresses one must be lost to find, / knee deep in flooded storm drains / clogged with crushed revisions, / a shredded blizzard, a ticker tape parade / gusting from the out-turned pockets / of the dead, enough litter / to trash the future, fuel without heat, / and yet, the past combustible enough to be compressed into a fistful of soot."

This is an example of the style, but is not the entire poem and is less effective when read out of context (or without it's beginning or end).

I highly recommend this anthology, as well as all of Stuart Dybek's writing. It is my humble opinion that "The Coast of Chicago" (prose) and "Streets" are the best examples of his work.