AmericanMental - Mike Jurkovic

Here is a poet making known the complaints that bounce around unexpressed inside our own heads, a kind of Larry David with line breaks. In a rare upbeat moment, he writes, "of course there's people/being born but" And it's in that but that the Jurkovic vision resides. In his universe, something's gone missing, the wife controls the Ambien, and Dylan was wrong. Still, there's a bit of that Nobel Laureate running throughout American Mental, a kind of sub-Canadian worldsick blues, that propels the reader with great velocity, and wordplay, and original insight through its pages.

-Tim Tomlinson is the author of Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poems), and This Is Not Happening to You (stories). He is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and teaches in New York University's Global Liberal Studies.

Mike Jurkovic is either the William Carlos Williams, Allan Ginsberg, or Charles Bukowski of the Hudson Valley.  Reflecting their influences, his work is drawn from his unique blueprint, the poems built of his singularly barbed brick and mortar. Grounded in reality, AmericanMental spews beauty, humor, and rage at the sublimely monotonous. One envisions the poet spent, under a Bodhi tree with a tall drink - a blue Buddha shaking his head in disbelief, as "all the psychosis slides east on Thursdays" watching "us thicken with laughing eyes." Read this "cry from the fist," throw back your head and shout!

-Janet Hamill's, A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems 1975-2007, was recently published by Spyuten Duyvil

AmericanMental gives us a poet at the top of his game. Iconoclastic impulse wrestles progressive idealism in the town of shit-lorn. Here we confront pettiness, inequality ' desperation as felt by many who've had the misfortune of believing in that American Dream: success for all ' everyone, only to find it doesn't exist. That's not to say life is perfect elsewhere. No. These poems challenge hypocrisy ' injustice wherever found. Crack the cover - a rousing ride awaits!

-Roger Aplon, Editor/Publisher Waymark - Voices of the Valley; author Barcelona Diary, It's Only TV, and, from Unsolicited Press: Mustering What's Left - Selected ' New Poems 1976 - 2017