Dead Ends, Detours, Blind Curves and a Roundabout Road Home

"You don't read an Ed Tato poem, you experience it. First and foremost a storyteller, Tato traverses, sticks and weaves through working-class milieus that include hotels and factories and the man of the desolate places most people would never care to glimpse with surrealistic imagery that combines a hard-hitting reality. Part Eliot, part-Simic with some Bukowski-although don't bank on the typical Buk tropes-Tato is an original on his own. Dead Ends, Detours, Blinds Curves and Roundabout Road Home is unlike anything you've read and well-worth the investment."


-Nathan Graziano, author of Fly Like The Seagull




"Tato's poems are a revelation. They move patiently and with great assurance past personal landmarks, through soft despair, through quiet strength, through resignation, and then come out on the other end with a unique sense of unsettled certainty. These are poems that believe in the power of mystery, that embody the concept of quiet strength. They drift, but never waver. They soar, but remaingrounded. Most importantly, as we all spiral down deeper and deeper into the abyss of petty grievances and tribal mindsets that the modern world has become, these are poems that offer no appeasement, only the stark beauty of unvarnished, unapologetic truth."


-John Sweet, author of A Dead Man, Either Way


"More bout than book, this collection from Ed Tato puts you in the ring with a Brink's driver, a barber and hunchback from Humboldt (hometown of Walter Johnson). You'll hit the circuit from Pittsburgh to Buffalo, from Lawrence to Wabash in these stick and move poems that never go for the knockout but jab, jab jab. And you've got the cornerman in Tato to make it to the bell. Porkpie and chewed-ended stogie and towel rolled in his right hand. Ice and andreline. Keep the jab, he says, find the footwork and when one lands stay with it for a beat. Feel it. And what you learn here is that there is nothing more, there is just this. A rickety stool, the sweatsmell and the sting of wanting it to be more than a match. Gloves up."


-Jason Wesco, author of Rough Traces


"Tato is a details man and a blues man, the kind of storyteller you're afraid to invite over unless you want to relive you're most harrowing adventures through his sharp,
sorrowful, if not compassionate eyes. These poems ignite all five senses, bringing the reader to life: missing people they've never met before, hearing highways heave in cityscapes they've never even visited, suddenly craving Player's Navy Cut cigarettes. This book is full of tales from the front -- of a life clearly spent living -- and wisdom rooted in spirited, but humble experience."


-Timothy Tarkelly, author of On Slip Rigs and Spiritual Growth (OAC Books) and Luckhound (Spartan Press).