 SECRET DAMAGE | We Dream with Heads of Fire in this House of Cards Queen Mother of Portentous Victory, please accept my neck upon this cobalt platter. Where the bees first dart their dry mouths around me, produce cracked abdomens begging, I display for them, my wounds unwrapped. Mud-wasp and warbler sung, I knew something of gravity, journeying with my one oar, tethered to a smallness of land. Non-bird, but with the pondered strangeness of bird, replete with air and artifice. Here, where we baptize our young in molten glass, the elders recount when once I cut my hand, an armada of paper boats rushing forth. Irreproachable, invisible haircut, these myths succumb to nothing. |
PRAISE FOR SECRET DAMAGE
If you're born with a name like Russell Dillon, you can grow up to be either an outlaw or a poet. Or, in the case of this particular Russell Dillon, both. Secret Damage is slippery testimony given under duress, a mysterious Midwestern ship's log, a peek under the hood of 'the stalled engines of cricketry.' These are ambitious poems, as sweepingly Romantic as they are pointillisticly punk. This chapbook will become your instant companion, one youíll love even as you suspect it of espionage.
If you're born with a name like Russell Dillon, you can grow up to be either an outlaw or a poet. Or, in the case of this particular Russell Dillon, both. Secret Damage is slippery testimony given under duress, a mysterious Midwestern ship's log, a peek under the hood of 'the stalled engines of cricketry.' These are ambitious poems, as sweepingly Romantic as they are pointillisticly punk. This chapbook will become your instant companion, one youíll love even as you suspect it of espionage.
—Dobby Gibson, author of Polar and Skirmish
Surrealism is one of the dominant modes in contemporary poetry, and Russell Dillon's poems are a fresh take on the possibilities of surrealism. His poems can be funny and creepy all at once, like Simic and Dean Young, but he has a remarkable ability to merge the surreal and the quotidian, as when Nixon said he was not a crook or Bush said 'Mission Accomplished.' Secret Damage is a fine athletic read, and Dillon is probably the best 'new poet' you've read this year.
—Ed Ochester, Editor of the Pitt Poetry Series
and author of Unreconstructed: Poems Selected & New
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Russell Dillon was born in New York during the mid '70s and hasn't been able to get over it. However, in an effort to put the past behind him, heís attended a number of schools in various places, learned things at each one of them, and received degrees from Emerson College and the Bennington Writing Seminars. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alligator Juniper, Big Bell, Forklift, Ohio, and Tight, among others. He currently lives in San Francisco, where he does almost everything life asks of him.