Fish Gotta Swim

Fish Gotta Swim: A book equal to anything in the craft of American writing—Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, Billy Budd—instantly takes its place in the American canon.
John Thorpe

Larry Kearney’s Fish Gotta Swim has been described as the finest memoir blending fact and imagination since Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. It is an extraordinary story of a child coming to consciousness of the world through the measures and sightings of poetry and song, this time in Mother Brooklyn. Read it, then teach it to your children.
Benjamin Hollander

Larry Kearney’s lyrical, probing voice has been an essential in American poetry for the last 50 years.
Joanne Kyger

Kearney is one of those unsung cats who has been producing intelligent thoughtful snarly deeply musical poetry, deeply felt wryly wrought astute poetry of the first rank for decades for a select few—you’re in for a rare treat.
David Meltzer

His ear is uncanny, tuned with perfect fidelity to culture high and low, to all the temptations of language and heaven. His curiosity about form and metric have turned his work into a palace of music; it’s a poetry so melodic and harmonically inventive as to approach the aural splendor of, say, Charlie Parker’s Birdland . . .
Kevin Killian