Winner of last year’s Faulkner-Wisdom Prize, Dennis Formento‘s Phaeton’s Wheels takes us to Italy and takes us to New Orleans as the poet explores his roots in these two places via his sharp, neo-Beat, sensibility, paying homage to poetic forebears along the way, as in this tribute to New Orleans legend Tom Dent:

For Tom Dent

(1932-1998)

“In the marrow of the desert palm”
something, looks like a bitter pill,
drops from the dream balcony
with the power of art to knock out
history with a love-kick. Roberts,
the bus-driver, prays, “let me zoom past the sun
& tell the stars
ride on, mamas”
certain secret messages are no secret—
revealed to someone who wrapped himself
in a lake of fog, & lay down
in explicit dreams.  He thought no one
was listening, but you know it—
he was talking non-stop
& we got a bunch of it on tape.  When an old man dies
it’s like losing entire libraries.  All or nothing,
it’s still everything to the voice of desire
pleading don’t, stop, when the crowds of his lovers
from every stratum of his past return
& whisper to him again all the secrets
of his poems that have the density of dreams.
Stripped of my own death metal I might begin to listen.
Death is getting harder and poetry more expensive
every day, dripping like fire from the nightly kitchens
on the moon from which, Mingus tells us, certain people
shouldn’t come back
while we’re searching for a nickel
on the bottom of the pool.

Pick up your copy here.