WHY WOULD BILL SHUTE LIE TO YOU? THE DUDE ROCKS!

My new collection, HEATHEN TONGUE, is currently available in limited quantities from his Kendra Steiner Editions.  Due us all a favor and buy one.  Do the math - has Trump bought one?  No.  Is he a fuckwad asshole?  Yes.  Will buying one help elevate you above this level of awfulness?  Best not to risk it.......

JOHN SWEET

“Heathen Tongue” (KSE #392)

edition of 61 hand-cut, hand-assembled copies

$6 USA postpaid (see below for postage rates outside USA)

payment via paypal to   django5722(at)yahoo(dot)com

please leave note with your order listing what you’re buying and mailing address…thanks!

From the man himself, Bill Shute:

"Happy to welcome back Central New York state poet JOHN SWEET for another chapbook of new poems. KSE first published a collection of his in 2008, and I had been reading his work for probably another ten years before that. He is truly an original–with an instantly recognizable voice and poetic form.

Sweet’s poems are lean and sculpted to be razor-sharp. They embody real-life voices, beaten-down by real-life problems, with the extra salt in the wound of bullsh*t and hypocrisy and permanent war and militarized police and domestic violence and insane fundamentalism and mass delusion. The speakers in Sweet’s poems are survivors, and they are leaving poetic messages in the bottle of a KSE chapbook, giving a testimony to the insane, violent, corrupt, painful world that  has been created around us, and he does not flinch when documenting our own complicity. His work never whines and never editorializes and never presents any pat answers. It should be clear to all by this point that this experiment we’re all part of is not working. In a restrained but tense voice, Sweet’s poems point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. His poems cut through the crap, and there’s no macho posing or laughable “outlaw” self-deception. If I peel off the blinders, this is what life is like. Friends, that is an amazing accomplishment, if you think about it. I remember that kind of feeling when I first read Theodore Dreiser….or Richard Wright…or James T. Farrell…or Georges Simenon…or David Goodis….or maybe Celine.

With dozens of books to his credit over the last few decades, and probably hundreds of individual poems published in printed and online literary journals in addition to those in the books, John Sweet continues to have his finger on the pulse of what’s wrong with this society and its people.

When we had the KSE 9th Anniversary event in Dallas 3 years ago, I read poems by three KSE authors in addition to my own poems: the late Doug Draime, Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, and John Sweet (in fact, if you look at the pic that I use as my Facebook profile photo, and look at it closely, you’ll see it’s one of Sweet’s books I’m holding and reading from, NOT one of my own!). I believe in these poets’ works, and I am proud that KSE has gotten behind them and gotten many new creations of theirs out into the world over the years….thus, I’m glad to present these TEN new pieces from John Sweet. If you’ve never read him before, I can assure you, you won’t soon forget his work once you do read it. Get your copy now. Limited hand-cut, hand-assembled edition of 61 copies."