Publisher's Synopsis
Five-star rating
"Dark, agitated, original..."
"This is a painful book, both excruciating and, on occasion, bleakly funny. I was reminded of some other reliquaries of sorrow - "The Inman Diary", Cyril Connolly's "Unquiet Grave", and William Ellery Leonard's "Two Lives". Traum's voice is learned, musical, and various, but never less than distinctly his, whether in sonnets, free verse, or diary. It is more about feelings and responses to events than it is about the events themselves, which one sometimes suspects are still too raw to contemplate.
'Fifty Poems of Love, Death, and Disdain & Five Excerpts from A Diary of Delirium and Despair' will not be for everybody, but it will find its audience."
- Tim Page - Pulitzer Prize Winner for Criticism, music writer and culture reporter at The NY Times, Newsday, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Professor of Journalism and Music at USC, Oberlin, Author of "Parallel Play", "Dawn Powell: A Biography", etc., etc.
From the book's back cover -
"Love, death, sex, existential dread, misanthropy, nihilism - suffering, compassion, beauty, infinite longing - perverse family melodrama, lies, deceit, betrayal, rage - the horror of having been born, the absurdity and terror of being imprisoned in a decaying sack of flesh, the possibility of an afterlife in an infinite, shimmering sea of consciousness - all this, and much, much more - in poems which display a consummate mastery of meter, rhyme, and form rarely encountered in contemporary poetry, and culminating in five profoundly disquieting, mind- bending prose pieces - haunting, hallucinatory, and euphorically demented.
Not to mention a healthy and refreshing dose of dark, sick, jokes.
What more could a reader wish for?"
