PRAISE FOR SOFT MONEY

Soft Money features a symphonic consciousness that is the aggregate of both orchestra and audience. These poems are peeled from the foothills of a revolutionary stage. Science-art-proletariat poems; projections of the day before history begins again. Rathgeber offers a recreation of masses in which underneath the idea of revolution is all of us; targets phasing in and out of our invincibility. 

—Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes

Poet without apology! Poet with a fight for the day's view! “We infiltrate like this. / We infiltrated everywhere. / You didn't notice.” Joseph Rathgeber gives poetry the hard truth in his amazing collection SOFT MONEY! I love this book! I trust this poet!

 —CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

Joseph Rathgeber is writing poetry for the people. Soft Money is as much accessible as it is incendiary. He goes hard, not only at capitalism, but the whole poetry establishment—and with enough wordplay to fill a rap album, he knows how to get his message across. He is, as one of his poems says, as industrious as a motherfucker.

—Nikolai Garcia, author of Nuclear Shadows of Palm Trees

there is nothing more mainstream in the 21st century than our counterculture—anger, laughter, lighter fluid: all digital and worthy of our likes & our mentions, our hashtags & our outrage…especially in the American Carnival of poetry. but Joseph Rathgeber doesn’t belong there. like many outsider poets, he doesn’t float his poems down the avenue for parade. street sweeping is a festival unto itself. in Soft Money, Rathgeber doesn’t wield poetry as baton, but as broom handle; an approach not adored since the Beat Era, Black Arts Movement (and maybe the Golden Age of Hip Hop)—Soft Money is the secret handshake between Bob Dylan & Boots Riley: why won’t white people take crowbars / to Panera? / They have the numbers / and the capacity—somewhere deep within—I believe….Soft Money is not an appeal to the fly-over-states, the bible belt; nor does it acquiesce to those for who “the streets” is more a fandom than a battle cry. To call someone with a sufficient amount of money / “comfortable” is discomfiting     to me. We’re not talking pants / or heels or corsets….in these poems, in Rathgeber’s casket nail hands, the economy is indeed in trouble—just not in the way any Wall Street stockbroker would think. in spirit, Ray Durem & Redman (and maybe a bit of Jimmy Hoffa) meet in this collection. the 21st century has backed so many excellent poets into a corner, but Joseph Rathgeber’s poetry has its back against the wall; and while these socially indicting poems may, in the end, chew off their own legs for freedom, it won’t be until after claiming the hunters’ legs as well.

—upfromsumdirt, author of Deifying a Total Darkness