Description
“Poppin’ Johnny: New American Poems” by George Wallace is a stunning collection by a poet whose work recalls the conversational diction of the Beatniks, but with an absolutely contemporary flavor. Known worldwide due to his broad-based internet following (for years, Wallace has posted his poems online almost daily), Wallace has selected more than 70 poems for this collection, presenting a panorama of modern-day Americana, a kind of post-modern poetic “On the Road” that feels like music and offers a surreal trip into what’s left of the American heartland. His honesty is as refreshing as his incredible fresh and wholly-original technique. As original Beatnik musician David Amram notes, “Jack Kerouac would have loved him.”
Poppin Johnny; New American Poems, by George Wallace, Three Rooms Press
ISBN: 978-0-9840700-2-2, $15.00, 6” x 9”, 116 Pages, September 2009, Trade Paper, Poetry
High Praise for Poppin’ Johnny
Zvi A. Sesling (dougholder.blogspot.com): “Nitty-gritty, down in hole, Wallace rips life as if it were a piece of paper, leaving the edges jagged and the paper crumpled like so many lives he observes.”
Jack Foley: “A George Wallace poem is a burst of articulation that carries us into the country of Talk. These poems—brilliant, funny, dangerous, cantankerous—announce the pure pleasure of speaking.”
Robert Peake: “These are poems as rough and vulnerable as manhood, as full of hope and heartbreak as the new world. If you want to know what America feels like in your mouth, read George Wallace out loud.”
“George Wallace has written the quintessential American book of poetry. The poems in his new book Poppin’ Johnny New American Poems lift off the pages like so many warm-colored hot air balloons in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. And while they glide over the American checkerboard of fields and farms, these poems also hover over the urban streets of American cities where they take in the smells of restaurants brimming with working people as the sun rises, the rough textures of alleys at night and the blue-denimed boys who ride subways, and others who fling fish guts for a living.” by Lenny DellaRocca. Read the full review of Poppin’ Johnny at Greenwich Village Gazette.
About George Wallace
George Wallace (AB, MPH, MFA) is an award winning poet and journalist from New York who has performed his work across America and in Europe. Author of Poppin’ Johnny (Three Rooms Press, 2009) and twenty-five chapbooks of poetry, he has served as editor of Poetrybay (www.poetrybay.com), Long Island Quarterly, Walt’s Corner, Great Weather for Media, and other electronic and hard copy literary publications. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, USAF Medical Officer and Community Health Organizer, he is winner of the CW Post Poetry Prize and the Poetry Kit Best Book award. With Oklahoma poet laureate Carol Hamilton he co-founded the Woody Guthrie Poets, and was named a “Next Generation Beat” by the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festival committee. In 2003, George Wallace was named first Poet Laureate for Suffolk County, NY. In 2011 he was named Writer in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.
