NCWN

Courage of Straw by Robert Abbate
Published by: Main Street Rag Publishing Company
ISBN: 978-1-59948-235-4, 82 pages, $14 (cover price)


In Courage of Straw, Robert Abbate addresses forthrightly and steadily difficult issues of religious faith and personal relationships. From these materials he has drawn a fine-tuned formal music that sounds in the heart as resonantly as it sounds to the ear. His formidable skills are always in the
service of genuine feeling and rigorous thought--and of pleasure. A wonderful collection!

--Fred Chappell

Laced with allusions to Dante's Inferno, Abbate's collection presents a gallery of souls trapped in living hells:  Matthew Shepard getting tortured and pistol-whipped, Giordano Bruno burning at the stake, three young brothers being immolated by a terrorist's Molotov cocktail, Theodore Roethke
undergoing electroshock, an Irish hunger striker experiencing the agonies of starvation. At home with these more modern poems are others that retell Biblical stories with similar themes of violence and vengeance.  In Robert Abbate's world, redemption arises not from symbolic ritual acts, but from
the donation of a kidney by one human being to another, a gift of the sword and of blood.  Yet it is also a world that never loses faith in the power of language to bear witness.

 --Julie Kane, Author of Jazz Funeral    

 
Courage of Straw is scheduled for release on April 12th, 2010, and is available for advance order until March 29th, 2010. The advantage of ordering it online from the publisher's website is that you can get it for $9 (plus $1 shipping per book). The book can be ordered from the "Coming
Soon" page of the MSR Online Bookstore: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/ComingSoon.php