spuytenduyvil

On Gordon Osing

 

Gordon Osing’s Things That Never Happened is brilliant, soul-deep, questing, and fun. One thinks of Wordsworth’s Prelude done with a great jazz beat, and then one thinks of all the good books wrung from a writer’s experience, from a life. The book has the force of a train rumbling through a vibrant city. Its observations are startling and pleasurable even as they disturb.

     Richard Bausch, author of Wives and Lovers

 

In Things That Never Happened each of the little ones in the house must find his and her way out, must face the ordeals of trying to love, must find and enact a self who is not blindsided by the simplest blandishments of assimilation in town.

     Tom Russell, author of Travelling with the Magi

 

With a fluidity of intellect plumbing the heart of stone, Osing is one of the most gifted philosopher poets America has ever produced. A Mid-Western Southerner, his art never sedentates in the metaphoric game-board of the local, rather the concern for form as universal wings us to the four corners of the poem. No practitioner or radical experimenter has mined it with as much questioning honesty or risk.

     t thilleman, author of The Special Body

 

The Water Radical will come to rank with the best of the travel journals, verse or prose. It’s captivating, and its resolutions are marvelous.

     Miller Williams

 

The Jazzer & The Loitering Lady is a most startling autobiography, really. A trip to the harsh, beautiful geography of ‘home,’ and the terrifying psychic territory of his own germination as a man and artist. At times painful, most often riotously funny, lines jump off each page like cut diamonds reflecting the clear light of accurate, cutting observation.

     Tom Collins, Albuquerque Journal

 

Gordon Osing observes, questions, celebrates, and gives voice to pathsweepers, dead poets, even the silence in a ruined temple. He is a guide you can trust.

     Nancy Willard