Austin LaGrone’s poetic persona is a reckless, brazen, in-your-face funny man who is always talking some kind of wild jive that deploys itself in acts of original language and sheer verbal genius rarely available in contemporary American poetry. The poems in Oyster Perpetual are fresh, canny, rowdy, tender, outrageous, gaudy, and laugh-out-loud funny, often all at once. What Austin LaGrone gets away with on a single piece of paper is probably illegal, somewhere. There is risk involved in the production of this much liberty. I say let it prosper.
—Michael Heffernan
Austin LaGrone was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Brilliant Corners, Fourteen Hills, Hayden’s Ferry, Many Mountains Moving, Spoon River Poetry Review and the New York Quarterly. He holds degrees from St. John’s College and New York University and teaches at John Jay College in Manhattan.