Eliot Katz & Hall Gardner together...

Hall Gardner ("The Wake-Up Blast") informs us that he & Eliot Katz ("Love, War, Fire, Wind") are both to have work published in the forthcoming poetry collections, "The Final Crusade" and "Venus Rising", both edited by J. N. Reilly. Congratulations to both of them! More details to follow when available.

"Love, War, Fire, Wind" is available now on Lulu...

The Eliot Katz/William T. Ayton collaborative book, "Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America's Skull" is available now from the online printer, Lulu.com:

http://www.lulu.com/content/3500207

It should be available shortly (next few weeks) from Amazon, etc. We shall post the links to online booksellers where the book can be found. Cover price is $18.00 (184 pages, soft cover).

Drawings from "Love, War, Fire, Wind"

Here are several of the interior illustrations from "Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America's Skull" by Eliot Katz (poetry) & William T. Ayton (artwork). You can also see a preview page of the book here.

Love, War, Fire, Wind: the blurbs

Below are the back cover blurbs for "Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America's Skull" (see front cover to the left) by Eliot Katz (poetry) & William T. Ayton (artwork). The first two refer to previous works by Katz, the others are for the new book. Many thanks to the authors of the blurbs. The book itself should be available within a few days.

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS WORK:

"Another classic New Jersey bard! E. Katz has created his own original poetics for personal observation, animated discourse, critical insight, fantasy, and communal vision."
—Allen Ginsberg

"Eliot Katz's poems are wonderful in their celebration of life and rhythmic verbal exuberance, set against the atrocities of now."
—Adrienne Rich, about Unlocking the Exits


PRAISE FOR LOVE, WAR, FIRE, WIND:

"I love these poems, which are full of passion and thought. Eliot Katz is among a handful of contemporary American poets whose work speaks to me."
—Howard Zinn

"One of the amazing facts about Eliot Katz as a poet is that you can just never predict what he will do next. His sparkling mind, his acute political savvy, his comedy and his all-embracing warmth are always there. He is going to save the world even if it doesn’t want to be saved. And he is going to enjoy tossing tasty language around while he’s doing it. Eliot is right up there carrying the torch for Whitman and Ginsberg, keeping their vision alive and well. But who knew that he was going to turn into a tender love poet? I've never seen love poems like the ones in here. And who knew that this urban activist was going to transform himself into the companion of a fire-watcher, gazing at the world from a forest peak in the Canadian Rockies? Love, War, Fire, Wind, is his best book yet, a must-read for anyonewho believes poetry can still celebrate life."
—Alicia Ostriker

"Here is one of our greatest poets looking out from North America's skull onto the streets of change and protest, with nonstop insight, orange groves of facts, and wit. Eliot Katz is a poet of clear American progressive poetic consciousness. Love, War, Fire, Wind collects his direct Postbeat social chronicling of the Bush years. Let these poems that veer with surrealistic influence and a masterful grasp of media vernacular be the measure of any government and a gateway for what's to come."
—Jim Cohn

"Eliot Katz, spiritual son of Whitman & Ginsberg, is a poet of hypnotic velocity, of anger that has risen to aria, of a comic (& sometimes elegiac) high seriousness. His is Walt's 'primal sanity' that in this faithful & furious book—Love, War, Fire, Wind—refuses to desert us."
—William Heyen

"William T. Ayton has mastered the art of drawing with ink and brush. Like the words of Eliot Katz, his brush marks the page with deliberate force. A broken eggshell, weapons and dreams, a stroke that can not be taken back. This book is an affirmation of truth."
—Tim Slowinski

Eliot Katz photo by Vivian Demuth

Here is the photo of Eliot Katz by Vivian Demuth that was originally intended to go on the back cover of the forthcoming book, "Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America's Skull" (Narcissus Press, 2009), however, due to the large number of blurbs to go on the back cover, it was relegated to the interior pages at the back of the book, where it can be see in monochrome. Here it is in full color.

BTW, the book he's holding is his collection of poems, "Unlocking the Exits", published by Coffee House Press, 1999.

Eliot Katz reads "Grounding the Nerves"

From the forthcoming Narcissus Press book, "Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America's Skull" (illustrated by William T. Ayton.)

New blog for Narcissus Press

Hello & welcome to the new blog, for the small literary house, Narcissus Press. We currently have 2 (almost 3!) poetry books published — Diana Ayton-Shenker's "Tumbalalaika", Hall Gardner's "The Wake-Up Blast", and the forthcoming "Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America's Skull" with poems by Eliot Katz, & art by William T. Ayton.

Here are the covers:























The fourth image is the cover of our literary review, "Narcissus", which is currently in the early planning stage. More details will be announced when known.