Taliban Beach Party

Eric Howard

Eric Howard’s debut poetry collection reveals the secrets that bind office work to war, Gidget to the damned, the Bible to popular song, mythology to fact, and Los Angeles to Ovid. On a bicycle ride through heavy traffic, it versifies the last days of a failed pimp, gives a tarot reading to warplanes, and deciphers the hieroglyphics of lost empire.

• "As adept working with the sonnet and sestina as with loose-fitting lines, Howard produces poems of great immediacy that stir with emotional depth." —David Trinidad