A Love for Lavender Dragons

Author: Muth, John David

Number Of Pages: 74

Details: In his debut book, A Love for Lavender Dragons, Muth takes great pleasure in skewering some of our sacred icons. With rapier wit and cunning metaphor, he targets everything from online dating to diet soda to staff retreats to hands-free bathrooms (A flush tells me I’ve peed enough) to a recent lover (She lies with her back to me / red hair loose / like a vanilla scented hemorrhage). Faced with one rejection after another, Muth never gives up on finding that perfect love. As reader, you’re relieved he’s extricated himself from the latest relationship in one piece. Muth turns the ordinary inside out and does it with such wicked glee you don’t want the book to end. Nancy Scott, author of Running Down Broken Cement Poet and critic Matthew Rohrer says, “There’s a kind of humor that is bigger than a giggle, bigger than a laugh.” This larger humor abounds in John Muth’s A Love for Lavender Dragons. We laugh when Muth’s yoga teacher leaves her students in the Downward Dog Pose while she has an acrimonious cell-phone conversation with her husband, but his satire and irony also makes us recognize the pain caused by the tech-addicted. We laugh when Muth’s narrator thinks during a nervous date, “If you can stand the garlic on my breath / we might be ok until breakfast,” but we recognize the loneliness that impels him to keep attempting relationships with “lavender dragons.” “Too bad our love,” he moans, “was never as good as the sex.” Certainly, these deft poems leave Muth readers laughing at and pondering love and life in the 21st century. Lois Marie Harrod, Fragments from the Biography or Nemesis and How Marlene Mae Longs for the Truth The scarred protagonist of Muth’s collection, is a 40-something educator whose skirmishes in the singles bar arena have left him pitilessly out-gunned by the sorriest collection of tough-broad floozies—all, it seems, using his façade as their own personal dartboard. Whatever romantic notions he may once have held have dissipated in the wake of wenches whose “touch is a branding iron,” whose eyes “flash...twin stilettos,” whose kisses leave “a hint of rock salt and amaretto.” From the boardroom to the barroom we view the vulnerability of the post-modern middle-aged man on the make in images so perfectly timed in their staccato delivery we smile in spite of the pain. Sharon Olson

EAN: 9780692644805

Release Date: 13-03-2016

Package Dimensions: 9.0 x 6.0 x 0.2 inches

Languages: English