Popeye, Unchained

Poetry by M.G. Stephens and collages by Archie Rand. Old Popeye cartoons are the subject, satire verbal and visual is the intent. Popeye and Olive Oyl, Bluto and Wimpy all gather in the present as an epipsychidian flavored with American ease and powerful punches that land, Blam!, directly on the lantern jawed.

About the Author :
M. G. Stephens (Michael Gregory Stephens) was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and further out on Long Island, into a family of sixteen children. His father came from Ireland and his mother was from an old New England family whose ancestors included a North African indentured servant to the Wheelock family, the founders of Dartmouth College. His mother grew up in a 27-room Brooklyn mansion on Madison near Stuyvesant, right where Spike Lee shot Do the Right Thing, which was also a few blocks from where Stephens lived as a child. He has been around boxing all his life. He also worked various jobs, including a stint in the Merchant Marine, greens-keeping, being a caddy, Christmas tree salesman on the Lower East Side, gas-pump jockey, dishwasher, East Asia correspondent, bartender, and of course journeyman boxer and sparring partner. He lived for many years (15) in London, but now resides just north of Chicago, and has been exiled from New York for over twenty-five years. Kid Coole is the third novel about the Coole family, the other two being The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and Season at Coole, whose fiftieth anniversary of its publication by E. P. Dutton is in 2022. These novels comprise The Coole Trilogy. Besides Kid Coole, Spuyten Duyvil has just published Stephens' novel, King Ezra, about Ezra Pound. Born in Brooklyn, Archie Rand received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cinegraphics from the Pratt Institute, having studied previously at the Art Students League of New York. His first exhibition was in 1966, at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. He has since had over 100 solo exhibitions, and his work has been included in over 200 group exhibitions. He is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College which granted him the Award for Excellence in Creative Achievement in 2016. Before joining Brooklyn College, Rand was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University. He had served as the Acting Director of the Hoffberger School of Painting and as Assistant Director of the Mount Royal Graduate Programs, both at the Maryland Institute College of Art. From 1992-1994 he was appointed Co-Chair of the National Studio Arts Program of the College Art Association and from 1998-2003 he served as Chair of the College Art Association National Committee for the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award. The Italian Academy For Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University presented him with The Siena Prize in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Foundation Fellowship in 1999 and was made a Laureate of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, which awarded him the Achievement Medal for Contributions in the Visual Arts. In 2002 he received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching from Columbia University.

Review :
Michael Gregory Stephens is a brilliant writer, with a great imagination and heart. And his prose is downright gorgeous. Hilma Wolitzer M. G. Stephens, that dynamo prose stylist, has written a terrific novel, propulsive, action-packed, full of vivid, complicated characters, pleasurable from first to last. His ear for the way people talk is astounding. Kid Coole, his likable if forgetful pugilist-protagonist, may not always remember where his corner in the ring is, but Stephens knows every inch of the boxing canvas. Even those who have no interest in the sport will be drawn into the vortex of this brilliant piece of storytelling. Phillip Lopate