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Armed with poetry and wit, Danny wears his dead father's army jacket and copes with the string of losers and abusers brought home by his mother. Will he find direction before he reaches the end of this dead-end road life has handed to him?

Al Ortolani's most recent collection of poems, The Taco Boat, focuses not just on the people of the American Midwest, but on the connection to the humor and pragmatism of working men and women. His poems are vignettes from the fields of Kansas, the hills of the Ozarks, and the streets of Kansas City. They are about good dogs and crazy cats. His people are family and strangers alike. Both are seen with an empathetic eye. They share an attachmen...

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Al Ortolani's newest collection of poetry, On the Chicopee Spur, was released from New York Quarterly Books in 2018. How Wally Lost His Thumb and the Boy Scouts Became Cannibals, a mix of old and new "Wally poems" also appeared from Spartan Press the same year. A previous collection, Ghost Sign, co-authored with J.T. Knoll, Adam Jameson, and Melissa Fite Johnson was selected as a Kansas Notable Book for 2017. In 2019, Ortolani was a winner of ...

Al Ortolani's poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Tar River Poetry. His newest collection, On the Chicopee Spur, has just been released from New York Quarterly Books. A previous collection, Ghost Sign, Spartan Press/39 West, co-authored with J.T. Knoll, Adam Jameson, and Melissa Fite Johnson was selected as a Kansas Notable Book for 2017. Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas, a...

In On the Chicopee Spur, the haibun form allows Ortolani to speak plainly in the bread of prose, and then slice the loaf with haiku. It's the form Basho used to highlight his journeys across Japan in the seventeenth century. Many of the haiku are not written in the traditional 5-7-5 syllable format, but instead, speak tersely in the spirit of the haiku, experimental, American. Some of the subject matter comes from the immediacy of the hospice ...

Finding the Edge appeals with a wry, powerful combination of narrative and lyrical poems. The narratives are small novels, chiseled studies of human folly and vulnerability: You won't soon forget the reckless, highway-obsessed Wally or the hapless woman in "Copperhead." In his lyrical mode, Ortolani is beautifully expansive ("In the surrounding air, /the night spreads from my fingertips..."). Cinematic images abound to present a wondrous but n...

The poems in Al Ortolani's newest collection, Waving Mustard in Surrender, come from the streets of Kansas City and the farm roads of Southeast Kansas. His narratives are as much at home on asphalt as they are in bean fields. The natural world is common to the many facets of this collection. Like birds, his poems fly with striking images-as accessible as crank-pot crows, assassin herons, or starlings startled by cannon shot. There's a good dea...

Al Ortolani's poems in PAPER BIRDS DON'T FLY are a mix of small town memories and present day realities. They share both humor and sorrow, longing and contentment, often in the irony of a single experience. Many are set in Southeastern Kansas, a geographical region rich in the texture of its free-thinking people. The poems pinch the mundane arm. They bleed with the colors of everyday experience. PAPER BIRDS DON'T FLY is as accessible to the re...

In the 1920s and 1930s, Pittsburg, KS was a major coal-mining town, attracting various ethnic groups from southeast Europe and beyond. The often belligerent and divisive spirit of the miners--and the unpredictable politics of Southeast Kansas--earned the region the nickname, "The Little Balkans." The four poets (Al Ortolani, Melissa Fite Johnson, Adam Jameson, JT Knoll) appearing in this collection carry forward that same proud, independent sp...