Excerpts of reviews and commentary:

"A striking debut..."
--ALA Booklist

"Dithyrambs (is a)...quirky, spectacular monument."
-- Sydney Lea, Georgia Review

"Highly recommended..."
--Publishers Weekly

"Richard Katrovas is the best of the new poets."
--Denis Johnson

"This poet is, as they like to say in the South, "Doing business." Katrovas is real!"
--Dave Smith

"Richard Katrovas improvises the moment as if poetry itself were a survival skill, and in his capable and caring hands, it is."
--Stanley Plumly

"Richard Katrovas is a fine writer...He makes the (reader) feel gratitude, and, in addition to illumination, friendship."
--James Dickey

"As Hemingway portrayed Paris of the twenties, Katrovas portrays...post-revolution Prague. Katrovas is a talented and honest writer who captures the unrenderable, sees the invisible, and makes the truth into poetry."
--Arnost Lustig

"Tough, direct, gritty, full of wonder...there is nothing meek about Mr. Katrovas...He sings with an authority that is guided by compassion, by an unblinking eye for what is beautiful within what is not."
--New York Times Book Review

"Originality of this kind is rare...large and ambitious. Katrovas's Dithyrambs (are) bold and fascinating..."
--Donald Justice

"Our true poets begin their poems in the place "past weeping," (and) that's where Richard Katrovas is. Katrovas's Dithyrambs remind me of a contemporary Auden...They are funny, passionate...They are intense emotion locked in musical boxes, singing while exploding."
--Gerald Stern

"Katrovas revives the choral lyric form of Bacchylides and Pindar, and following Dryden as the single modern precursor, bravely explores the forms possibilities for late twentieth century verse...(These poems) never forsake the pathos of genuine desire."
--Carolyn Forche

"The Republic of Burma Shave is masterful. It is partly Mark Twain, partly Henry Miller. It is ferocious, tender, original."
--Gerald Stern

"The Republic of Burma Shave is an addictive, guilty pleasure...Katrovas is, as always, observant, outrageous, and completely original."
--Valerie Martin

"This is a fierce, wickedly funny, unguarded and utterly engaging memoir."
--Patricia Hampl

"Not since Walker Percy's The Moviegoer has New Orleans been treated with such delicacy and elegance...Mystic Pig is a fine and forgiving book."
--Frederick Barthelme

 

New from Carnegie-Mellon University Press:

by Richard Katrovas

Carnegie Mellon University Press
ISBN: 978-0-88748-468-1 $16.95 paper.

The Years of Smashing Bricks is about sex, drugs and karate in Coronado and San Diego, California, in the early 70s. It’s a memoir in the form of interlocking stories, and reaches back into Richard Katrovas’ odd childhood on the highways of America with criminal parents, and into his teens in Sasebo, Japan, with adoptive parents on a U.S. Navy base. Having earned a second-degree black belt in Sho-bu-kan Okinawa-te in the late 60s, at the height of the mystique of the black belt, Katrovas gave private karate lesson through his twenties in Coronado and San Diego; at the same time, he lived a bohemian life of sex, drugs, art and ideas. At the heart of this utterly unique, lyrical memoir is a young man’s coming to terms with the cultural fictions of masculinity, and with his divided affections for a dying birth mother with whom he has lost contact, and an adoptive mother who is at once noble, deeply decent, and emotionally abusive.

“Richard Katrovas has become an indispensable masculine voice, by turns brash and strikingly tender. These short stories form a strong, singular narrative, but they are also individual pieces of beauty and insight. Maybe only a poet can write memoir with this kind of torque.” Patricia Hampl

"The Years of Smashing Bricks is pleasantly unpredictable, departing from the formula of the standard memoir. It is strange and haunting, and often very funny. I found its grittiness exhilarating." Tracy Kidder