PRAISE FOR AMERICANITIS

“Americanitis thrives on the nervous energy of quick living, alternately witty, ironic, vulnerable, and self-deprecating. As if the love child of Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg found himself living in the queer underbelly of Southern Indiana, Doug Paul Case explores the endless contingencies of longing and belonging. Half long jumper, half linguistic acrobat, he keeps showing us how ‘even in disappointment we can be beautiful.’ Over and over, he gives us everything, yet somehow leaves us wanting more.”

— Bruce Snider, author of Fruit

“There’s something wrong in Doug Paul Case’s America, and these poems of wit, ribaldry, anguish, and hope seem to search for a cure. Case riffs on popular culture with aplomb, obsessing over everything from Craigslist and Calvins to Rihanna and Cy Twombly. Pleasure is held up as sacred; the collection glistens with small treasures, like the stag pendant found in a heating vent in ‘Buck’. Case never shies from telling it like it is, often with startling originality: ‘how much longer our planet could survive if we lived with less shame.’ An impressive debut.”

— Ian Humphreys, author of Zebra

“In a collection that giddily references Gus Kenworthy, Ace Perry, Brad Pitt, and their respective glorious physiques, it may come as a surprise that Americanitis is really about time. Or more accurately, a queer man’s questions about time. What is the difference between fantasy and the future? Between the past and nostalgia? Between gravity and light filtering through pine trees while the poet remembers a pair of purple briefs but not the name of the boy who wore them? Doug Paul Case’s poems are as memorable as a wound, as pleasurable as a day, fully spent, on this earth.”

— Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

“No one can resist the allure of Doug Paul Case’s honest-with-a-wink poems musing on a strain of modern Americana alive and well in the Rust Belt. These poems are slow and then fast, sprinkled with sparky humor and sly wit and raw, gorgeous lust—with the occasional glimpse of a totally not-at-all gratuitous penis.”

— Carrie Murphy, author of Fat Daisies