Omissionary

Omissionary is that delicious amalgam of real and magic, dark and luminous, comforting and punch-in-the-face. That wild genre-teasing ride of poetry I hope for and rarely find: plays and letters and prose, oh my! Where the poet taps into both his vulnerability and his vastly entertaining imagination, and the reader finds herself guffawing one stanza and leveled the next. I admire these poems for their razor pain and for their unyielding hold on a mystery that pushes us away whenever we get close to figuring it out. I love that the poet’s words surprise me and then move me to this great big heart, where I’m stunned by the volleys and throes of a life consciously lived. With Omissionary, Stephen Dvorak has accomplished a beautiful and original first book. 

—Maureen Seaton, author of Fibonacci Batman: New and Selected Poems


Reading Stephen Dvorak leaves me feeling exhilarated. He's a genuine original––a new voice, at once hilarious and scary, sophisticated and innocent. Dvorak sees the world without the Vaseline-smeared lens of nostalgia or sentimentality. Poem after poem in Omissionary undercuts romantic clichés and exposes the incongruous facts. Searching for authenticity in writing his generation and life, Dvorak calls up other provocative American originals, among them Whitman, John Wilkes Booth, and iconoclastic poet Jack Spicer. Dvorak's own taut observations insist that we see things as they are, and the freshness of his language and vision makes these poems a pleasure.           

––Joan Larkin, Author of Legs Tipped With Small Claws