Crypto-Arkansas
Mark Spitzer
ISBN 978-0-923389-52-9 $12.00 104 pages
Interesting and readable info, sources and legends and researches—in poetry form! The Archons of Investigative Poetry are pleased with Mark Spitzer’s Crypto-Arkansas.
Ed Sanders
Mark Spitzer’s work is as boundlessly inclusive as the journal he edits, The Toad Suck Review. Both are proof that the more interests and influences are incorporated, the more original the creation may become. This example of “investigative poetics” into “mythological crypto-zoological creatures” is in one sense pure Ozark-Arkansan, but is also a veritable cioppino-paella-bouillabaise-gumbo cum kitchen sink of Twain, Ed Sanders, dada, tall frontier tale-telling, Paterson, Gerald Haslam, and scholarly-journalistic research or the spoofing of it. It is Americana, archetypalism ... There is a formidable mind at work here, and a seemingly limitless creativity.
Gerald Locklin
Mark Spitzer, polymath and polymer, is the author of twenty books. Most of them are about fish or violent perverts. He’s also written a bunch of poetry and literary translations. His ten greatest hits include: Season of the Gar, Chum, The Pigs Drink from Infinity, After the Orange Glow, Writer in Residence, Sick in the Head, The Genet Translations, The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille, Age of the Demon Tools, and Blaise Cendrars’ Films without Images. Spitzer is the Editor in Chief of the internationally acclaimed Toad Suck Review (toadsuckreview.com), an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas, and he can be seen on reruns of Animal Planet’s River Monster series. For more info, visit sptzr.net.