Poetry. The pace too quickened to be a flaneur’s, the passion too corporeal to seem the eye of a camera. Jon Curley’s latest book of poems, SCORCH MARKS, is a visceral shout-out, a call–as much prayer as dare–to those who would acquiesce by keeping virtual or literal pen in pocket, in the face of injustice and lies. In ‘Spirit Notebook, ’ the poet asks, ‘What is my responsibility in the crowded valley of words?’ The question is neither glib nor disingenuous. Curley does not care to fuck around worrying if a reader will find these poems too stark and starkly mad–deranged by grief, or, colloquially, by anger. SCORCH MARKS’ poems cut, jab, and yearn. It is a yearning that refuses to give in or give way.–Elena Alexander

As we struggle to make sense of our times, Jon Curley delivers this salve for the senses and soul. Essential. Burning. Brilliant. –Marylou & Jerome Bongiorno

Curley’s poetry calls in language’s magic, its errancy, the thing that ‘sounds itself outside itself’ –Michael Heller

Jon Curley does not work within inherited registers and meters of the rhetorical tradition Zukofsky brilliantly exploited, a tradition whose paradigm is perfection; instead this younger poet, uninterested in nostalgia, finds the music of his own time, or better to say he creates it. That he allows this music to guide his poems toward their provisional truths, the only truths anyone can hope to know–that he establishes a music and within it a way of knowing authentic to our present–is a testament not only to his honesty but to his skill as well. –Burt Kimmelman