This Drawn & Quartered Moon makes pre-millennial San Francisco its epicenter, and from there ranges out in time and space. Characters abound. The reader will meet a plagiarist, a Vietnam vet named Othello, a Mafia don, a drug mule en route to jail, Elvis Presley (the poet’s father was his doctor), a “Sculptor of the Lower Fillmore Head Shot,” a dying Arab king and a pre-fame Courtney Love.
“Autodidact and gregarious loner” klipschutz mixes the personal and the public, satire and romance, dramatic monologue and prose poem, street swagger and subtle song. Over ten years in the making, this collection evokes the restless spirit of predecessors such as Nicanor Parra, Gregory Corso and Kenneth Patchen.
Praise for This Drawn & Quartered Moon:
“A succinct, speedy chronicle of events as they come at the author with bewildering multiplicity and congestion. To encompass it all, he responds with such variety that some poems look surreal despite their very real particulars.” (Carl Rakosi, The Collected Poems)
“Breathtaking sound and rhythms. Endless wordplay, trippy delight, passion, heartbreaking rage, the comedic, the horror. Sorrow so deep it’s liberating.” (Sharon Doubiago, Love on the Streets, Hard Country)
"... there’s a pretty fine ride to be had in This Drawn & Quartered Moon ... A close examination of the man’s work on paper reveals that, more than mere zaniness, there is frequently a beguiling complexity to his poems that lingers long after their reading. Reviewing a book of poems by klipschutz is a little like critiquing a force of nature: the first instinct is to step back uncritically and admire the man’s penchant for conversational wit and incisive panache. …" (The Pedestal)