PRAISE FOR CHAINSAW POEMS & OTHER POEMS

“In Chainsaw Poems & Other Poems, Pope gently hands us a ripped starter chain, daring us to ignore the buzzing in the other room.”

— Zac Smith, author of 50 Barn Poems

“This book is about passion, obsession. It is about dismantling. There is a time in one’s life where you must simply see what is inside. An innate desire to dissect, dismember, and understand. That moment of peering into the new expanse is captured perfectly within these pages.”

— Cavin Bryce Gonzalez, author of I Could be your Neighbor isn’t that Horrifying?

“Chainsaw Poems & Other Poems cuts into the heart of human experience with humor and emotion. Like any good chainsaw, Pope’s poems take something big and make it small and easy to handle.”

— Mike Andrelczyk, author of Gateway 2000 & Other Poems

“These poems seem like they were written from an observant ghost, two inches removed from the speaker's corporeal body. There is a desperation to be liked or seen, almost as if exterior validation could convince the speaker that they are, in fact, real. As if that validation could glue them back into the body. If a chainsaw cuts a tree in a forest, but no one tweeted about it, did the tree fall? What matters and who defines meaning? Chainsaw Poems & Other Poems could easily be a drone flying above parties, the BART, through gyms, etc. and reporting footage back to the reader.”

— Shy Watson, author of Cheap Yellow

“ The uninitiated might think that a chainsaw can “saw / something / in half”, but Giacomo Pope’s Chainsaw Poems and Other Poems reminds us that's not quite true. “There's this piece / in the middle / that gets all / gobbled up.” I love Giac’s book because its poems feel like they’re spoken from this vanishing middle: between the chainsaw poems and the other poems, the poems of interiority and the poems of publicish spaces like the BART and coffee shops and sidewalks and parties, between love and (para)sociality, between comedy and tragedy, living and death (this book has chainsaws AND ghosts). “When I talk about my Twitter feed, I refer to you as my friend” is a poem title in this book for good reason. Read it and make a friend—a friend to clear forests with.”

— Tom Snarksy, author of Threshold