Just what you secretly wished for: Jackie DeShannon in a field of large plastic flowers from the 1960's, sea creatures darting past the corner of Avenue M and East 17th in Brooklyn, a good looking (though possibly stale) apple . . . it's like Joe wrote a book and put all of humanity, which includes you, in it. But humanity seems different now, way more interesting-revelatory even-when looked at through the Elliot prism. You might recognize yourself in that prism, but you're no longer just you: you and humanity's malfunctioning, incoherent business are suddenly, and brilliantly, ALIVE.
-Sharon Mesmer
Sitting down to read Joe Elliot's An Everything, you'll as easily be swiped off your chair and transported to "a booth at a diner" or to "El Mozote" or the "roofs of Arles" as to "disparate worlds that imply the infinite/and instantaneous passage of time." His imagery climbs on jungle gyms of juxtapositions tempting you to follow it through "the saturated color of MunchkinLand" only, like wonder, to be "made to work the assembly line" and end "bottled up and sold off," leaving you to contemplate the tacit gravity of "light spilling out" of an open fridge and the silent guffaw of a funeral parlor pop up ad. Like a post-modern Marcus Aurelius, Elliot treats readers to his bare-hearted consciousness in these meditations that vacillate wildly between brushing one's teeth and the dense silence that meets a lonely Universe...between particular identity and nothingness or a world "busy with birds /and filled with their song"... between the revolution of youth and the capitulation of old age. Indeed, throughout this volume, you can't help but suffer the author grappling with mortality, and, as "when a poet reaches the end," "you feel you finally/understand them, and maybe/ even yourself. . ."
-Tamra Plotnick, author of In the Zero of Sky"
Joe Elliot's new book, An Everything, is a celebration of the ordinary and the daily. Joe's the New York poet, the teacher, father, entertaining, insulting and every so often tossing a student's hand grenade poem back out the window. I love the humor and the surprises-when the universe becomes Sister Mary Theresa. Or a bird song becomes greater than the sky. Or at night while hanging wet towels on the railing or changing a lightbulb, suddenly an awareness of the "infinite and instantaneous passage of time." These poems are funny, deep and wise, and I was very glad to read them.
-Barbara Henning
