The final version of the Discarded manuscript was finally submitted to Gloria Mindock at Cervena Barva Press a couple of weeks ago. My author's photo was taken (see B&W profile photo, though I may have one other photo to consider), and James' illustration work was approved for the cover. Best of all, I just got a blurb for the back cover as written by my friend and past poetry instructor, Tom Daley. It was too good to not share with all of you now.
The following is what Tom had to say:
In this new collection by Chad Parenteau, the peculiar intimacies of the shared apartment experience emerge in imaginative and startling shapes. In Parenteau’s stunning tropes, the apartment, now war zone, now toxic wasteland, now party palace, at once magical and mundane, finds its excited denizens “burning their hands on bulbs to stay awake, / afraid to miss a summoning.” Parenteau musters poignancy, pathos, and the pathetic from the crowded sink and the discarded vodka bottles, breeding them into his lines with an acute and ironic sensuality. If, as the author contends, “The bed now leaves its own notches/on the backs of everyone/who’s slept in it alone,” these poems will leave their mark on the mind of any reader who has ever stammered through a roommate interview or suffocated from the incense sneaking under the crack at the bottom of a roommate’s door."
I told him via email that I couldn't thank him enough. If I just cut and pasted "Thank you Tom" on this blog fifty times, it still wouldn't be enough.
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