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Heart X-rays is a twenty-first-century beat epic poem that ranges across landscapes and voices, with appearances by Banksy, Pussy Riot, hip-hop, the down and out, the up and coming, heartbreak and joybreak, while exploring the mystery we call the human heart.
Now in its second printing, Heart X-rays offers poetry that strikes a cord today with non-traditional style and timeless poetic craft.
If indeed poetry can offer an RX, a prescription to the bloody joyful teary-eyed American paradox, it is one that calls forth all the voices that have not yet been heard, that harbors an innocence that reaches into the very heart of our own excellence. A collaborative work between two poets and working-class activists, Heart X-rays is a poetic memory of today written in the alphabet of a future.
“I think more highly of Heart X-rays now in my eighty-fourth year than I thought of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl when I heard him read it in 1956. Colasurdo and Mosson, in a demonstration of democratic commitment making no distinction as to who wrote which poem, reveal to us the cutting edge, the real news of our society as opposed to the white noise of our society which we call news in our surrender to corporate myth-making.”
—Djelloul Marbrook, JMWW Journal
“Banksy? Pussy Riot? They are somewhat maverick artists, outside the official approved culture by the oligarchies. They go or have gone incognito throughout the streets of the world. The authorities don’t like wry comments on public buildings, or guitar slashes with revolutionary rhetoric, and especially not by women. This book of poetry is certainly kin to those artists. It has a bit of Whitman in its best.”
—Dan Cuddy, the Loch Raven Review
“Marcus Colasurdo has been both an artist and an activist worth following for years. It is with absolute excitement that I look to see nature and humanity in its raw and wildly beautiful aspect in his new work. Marcus is a modern-day spiritual humanist Walt Whitman with a beatnik’s eye for the beauty in darkness.”
—Carla Christopher, poet laureate emeritus of York, PA
“G.H. Mosson is a unique nature poet as well as antiwar beacon and poetry activist.”
—Antler, author of Factory and poet laureate emeritus of Milwaukee, WI
“One way we understand poetry is by what is left with us—an aftermath—I cannot get these poems out of my mind.”
—Grace Cavalieri, host of The Poet and the Poem on Questions of Fire by G.H. Mosson
“Marcus Colasurdo’s organization of socially conscious artists is well known for their collective benefit performances, raising funds and awareness for organizations that work with poor, needy, incarcerated, and homeless folks. The energy that Marcus inspires through his singular vision of art and community service is unlike anything I’ve witnessed before or since.”
—Betty Schulz, Health Care for the Homeless
“The effect is that the anthology ends as a kind of manifesto, a call to arms for its readers and for societies the world over, to remember history, know not to retrace its tumultuous, bloody path, and create a better present and future.”
—Lines & Stars Journal on Poems Against War by G.H. Mosson