Greasy Handshakes: Poems

In GREASY HANDSHAKES Richard Gegick memorializes the daily lives of those struggling to get by in Trafford, an abandoned mill-town sunk in a valley outside of Pittsburgh PA as if sunk in a permanent depression. His poems are beautiful like the graffiti-painted box cars that pull through town; they flower-up like weeds from cracks in the asphalt littered with abandoned needles and condoms; they are punctured with wounds by the accidents they describe, and they are redolent of human sweat. Richard Gegick tells us in humorous and heartbreaking verse, stories of the hungry waiter in a desperate town; where alcohol, drugs, and gun violence are so close you need to duck and hit the ground to survive. -Joseph G. Peterson, author of Ninety-Nine Bottles