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OYSTER PERPETUAL

OYSTER PERPETUAL

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9844510-6-7

Pub Date: Feb. 2011

Pages: 76


By Austin LaGrone


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2010


Austin LaGrone has written a first book of exceptional singularity, wholeness, and focus of vision. He can be playful and tragic. His poems are deadly serious, even when they are funny, and he is unafraid of being understood. He is also unafraid of making fun of himself (or his persona) because he understands he is part of the great human joyful mess. He sings from right in the middle of it, he praises, he satirizes, his heart is broken yet he, his poems, still have hope.

—Thomas Lux, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2010


A measured light-heartedness emanates beneath the natural pathos of Austin LaGrone’s Oyster Perpetual. His humor sneaks up on us, not for the sake of a rehearsed laughter but for an echo of truth wandering the halls of mirrors. LaGrone knows how to pull off the masks of his speakers, and at first they (we) don’t know what has happened, what’s been revealed. Read Oyster Perpetual, and at times, be ready to laugh until the tears come. There’s maturity in this first collection, and its terrain is illuminated by a personal tune that enters us as we enter.

—Yusef Komunyakaa


    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.

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