AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK -- NEW BB POETRY RELEASE

By Sam Smith

Good news to break: Brian Rosenberger’s collection, And For My Next Trick, is released today by BeWrite Books. I’m BB’s poetry editor, of course, so I’m particularly proud of this superior piece of work from an outstanding poet.

Horror films and heavy metal are not what usually spring to mind at mention of poetry. Flowers, love, a little woe-is-me angst maybe. And then one opens Rosenberger's And For My Next Trick.

The collection should carry a health warning: *These Poems Can Bite*. 

And maybe the real next trick is that they can also move you. To new ways of seeing? You certainly won't be indifferent to them. Because Rosenberger has come up with a whole new way of being in-yer-face. And funny. At times so very funny. Especially when telling of his relationship with his grandmother.

I haven't seen Brian perform any of these poems, but I should imagine that he does it deadpan, and I expect that his audience's groans will be interspersed with laughter. Maybe both at the same time.

Here are two reviews from critics who read And For My Next Trick before release:

"With his twists and turns in poems like "Spaghetti Sauce" and "The Tenth Commandment" Brian Rosenberger is the modern-day Saki of the poetry world. In "9 to 5" he dumps on the workplace ("the suicide crawl of the second hand"). In "State of Decay (…a tattoo that seemed a good idea at the time),” he mourns the waste of his intellect. In the powerful "You Don't Hear the One that Hits You," a lost love is compared to Russian roulette. Rosenberger can be hilarious, as in "By Pork Possessed" or deep, as in the title poem, but he's always right in your face. Whether you like it, or not."

                                                  Cindy Rosmus (Editor of Yellow Mama, author of collections:

                                                  Angel of Manslaughter, Gutter Balls, Calpurnia's Window, and 

                                                  No Place Like Home.).

"...spiked with poisoned puns and acid alliteration... Rosenberger's blamk verse wriggles with imagery as witty as it is disreputable."

                                                   Ramsey Campbell