The corner of Memory and Desire. That’s where the prose poems of Joe Gastiger take us. They’re inhabited by a diverse cast: Aunt Joan, Commander Cody, Snow White on a can of tomato paste, Kurt Vonnegut, Magdalene mermaids, fathers more comfortable with tools than words, and leggy Mary Shulski. They all find a home here, along with the “wheatback penny on a plate beneath the geranium.” Loose Talk is a warehouse of theremins and fluoroscopes, a library of radio dials and mystery underwear, a lost litany for the unforgiven, a libretto (in a dead language) that reminds us “the destroyer of worlds and Our Lady of Fatima soul kiss at the mall.”
—John Bradley, author of Trancelumination
These prose poems are like transcriptions of what the angels hear in “Wings of Desire” when riding a bus at noon in Berlin, only in English. The sentences are not just assemblages but crystalline snow flakes that are fitted together like the jeweled gears of Ezekiel’s wheels at angles which turn the axes of meaning with perspectives and paratactic contexts generating new meanings. Any paragraph can contain hurricanes devastating coastal cities over centuries, play, loneliness, hope, the wonder and awe of reckoning lost love against the compensations that fall in our laps, the invention of the atom bomb, and Serbian ethnic cleansing, the collective result of which makes you sigh for humanity. By now the irony of Loose Talk should be apparent; it is anything but loose, and it contains multitudes, entire panoplies of experience: take it slow, or the wisdom and beauty might overwhelm you. It is written by a man whose name is Joseph, another great interpreter of dreams.
—Bill Tremblay, author of Shooting Script: Door of Fire
