Pettygod

The poems in Andrew E. Colarusso's Pettygod are irrepressible, holy, profane, tender, hilarious, "too hot to touch."_x000D_ _x000D_ "Andrew E. Colarusso's newest is a sharp-edged erotic, politically unflinching poetry collection where syntax is shattered to reveal deeper ancestral reckoning. Like Kamau Brathwaite, Colarusso understands the page as a score to conjure rebellion, bend grammar, break form, and tune the line to the frequency of diaspora, confessional grief, and spiritual survival. His language pulses with both prophecy and protest, as seen in poems like 'The Pussy Detective,' which blends pulp poetics, satire and sovereignty, and refuses the sanitized gaze of empire while regarding the vernacular as sacred terrain. In 'Who Hath Known the Mind of God,' the writer reckons despair and the brutal intimacy of city life as it unfolds into a fever dream of love and despair. Across his work, interiority becomes a site of disruption, therefore, Pettygod be a living archive for the haunted and the holy. Colarusso scribes like fire, raising sacred spaces from ash, where fracture and ruin form the raw scaffolding of a resilient desire to be free."—Mahogany L. Browne

About the Author :

Andrew E. Colarusso is author of Hívado (Flood Editions, 2022), among other works. He was born and raised in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where he runs Taylor & Company Books.

"Again and again, what gives structure to Colarusso's many-tongued collection--which includes poems in Spanish and in French, reverent elegies and cartoonish dreams, not to mention the filthiest sex poems I bet I'll read all year--is prayer, the postures and registers of a poet speaking up or down to that titular 'pettyg-d.' Or else it's something like prayer, addressed horizontally, to those dearest to us: 'not to faint or fail / against muzzle flash or flames / to this I promise the promise / of you.'"--Christopher Spaide, Literary Hub

"The architecture of Hívado constructs and creates a text that is as much about space as it is about words. In his manipulation of the white space of the page as well as the line, Colarusso generates in the reader a response that is akin to the delight in finding one's way through a maze, or solving or putting a puzzle together. His bold use of the caesura yields a work that is literally cracked and, therefore, open to all the complicated and difficult energies that that word connotes. Hívado, whose cracks both let in and emit light, is a world unto itself--one in which play, the serious play at the centre of our existence, is at work."--M. NourbeSe Philip, reviewing a previous edition or volume

"Hívado's disrupted surfaces force their reader to reassess the sharp boundaries between sound and world, how these borders are rendered in consciousness, speech, and on the page."--Garin Cycholl, The Typescript, reviewing a previous edition or volume