Imagine if Sartre and de Beauvoir battled it out on The Jerry Springer Show, and you get an idea what reading this book is like. Noah Cicero is one of the most amazing voices in fiction I've ever discovered. Remember the first time you read Bukowski, Miller, or Ginsberg's HOWL? Reading this book was like that for me: it just riveted me to the back of my seat and made me shake my head in wonder.
Noah's great innovation is the "sentegraph": prose so clipped that each line becomes poetry; the perfect obverse of "vers libre" poets who simply write prose with irregular line breaks. Noah comes screaming from the rust belt hell of Youngstown, Ohio, but don't expect just another sad-sack, Harvey Pekar type of artist: Cicero is young, brilliant, fearless, and completely original. He hangs out in Denny's and goes to strip bars and, in this book--written on the eve of the Gulf War II--rages against war and politics and the horror and emptiness the eve of war has caused him.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I hope this has helped.
