Crooked Speech

Read Sid Gold's new book cover to cover at one sitting. Your brain will be exhausted but also exhilarated and accelerated. Note Gold's passion for words, wordplay and how the way words sound is contagious. Cannily alternating between poems in traditional poetic structures and prose poems set as blocks of type, Crooked Speech keeps you jumping intellectually, emotionally, rhythmically. The poem-poems are lyric, often narrative, their measured lines growing out of one another clearly. The prose poems on the other hand are a wild ride--nothing linear about their logic, leaping through snippets of history, philosophy, legend, show biz, etc., etc., interspersed with comments snatched out of ordinary conversations in all their mundane nuttiness. The Gold mind is a goldmine--an amazing place to be, and to borrow one of his oft-used constructions: not capricious but capacious. For a good time, go there.

--Clarinda Harriss, Professor Emerita of English, Towson University

In CROOKED SPEECH, Sid Gold helps us grasp "the inevitable lurking beyond the reach of our words." In this mix of conventional stanzaic poems and prose poems linked together by skillful use of wordplay, sounds, wisdom, and glimpses of a personal narrative, Gold reminds us that even though we may be able to tell what some things are and others are not, much in this world still eludes us. You'll want to read this book more than once to capture all its subtleties.

--Nancy Naomi Carlson

Think of these poems as abstract paintings, as works of art, as jazz and blues, as mythological

creatures, as history and all the great literature blowing in on the wings of language.

The allusions are here, the dualities of alone/together, rural/city, dream/reality all is "seduced by

beauty." Kafka-esque, I love the mind of this poet who reminds us that "language is a difficult

but necessary medium," and that "the tongues of the field" are like "fireflies under the skin."

--Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of Dutiful Heart, and Capture Theory