City Poems

From the Preface by A.F. Moritz: Joe Fiorito's powerful City Poems is new with the freshness of sudden light on what was always beside us, but we became dulled to it, or turned away: it was too constantly troubling, too difficult. Searing in subject matter, profound in meaning and sympathy, the poems are also wonderfully inventive and skillful in poetic form, while remaining casual, colloquial: the art of the street's voice. They're very short: shooting stars. But they constitute pinpoint windows on vast regions, unknown or ignored worlds: struggling people, obscurely dying people, their full reality: the body-and-soul details of pain and loss, endurance, heroism, joys, ugliness and beauty, in the rough corners, wastelands, and crevices where insulted, injured life manages to persist amid the expanse of glass, steel, and money.