The Cheapskates by Jerome Sala.
Pub date: 2014
ISBN: 9780984607679.
104pp.
Price: $15.00.
Design by Julie Harrison.
"Vivid, envelope-pushing, steeped in pop yet bracingly lucid, these poems feel like culture critique, epigram, film fanzine, exercise, ironic lecture, cheap joke, meditation, satire and philosophical treatise rolled up into one, pulling the curtain aside to reveal not the man behind it, but our own hands working the controls. If being an artist means, as Howard Zinn once suggested, thinking “outside the boundaries of permissible thought” and daring “to say things that no one else will say,” Sala is the poetry world’s most consistent, brilliant, and laugh-out-loud funny example."
-Gary Sullivan
“From The Flintstones to the Khalisi in Game of Thrones, nothing on TV has escaped Jerome Sala’s attention, though as you can tell from these examples he has an affinity for the Other, for the cult of primitive, animal power transferred from animals, be they dragons or dinos. And where does he run with this knowledge? I have long admired Sala’s wit, his vulnerability, the astute social analysis like a knife that cuts through pretension and cruelty. But we love him for his cheapskate beauty, its rare unearthly gleam. The best poems here come “lit by a supernatural brightness/ that broadcasts delicious ideas, as only light can,/ at the very edge of palpability.”
-Kevin Killian