My Sixties by PJ Krass

Peter Krass is taking us, his readers, on quite a trip (and given the Sixties reference, the word’s two – at least – meanings pertain) in these poems. Time is sandwiched, hijacked and serenaded (“To travel like this is to fly, / free and high, like a kettle of kites,”) between youth and older age. The poet, side-kicking along with Bruce Springsteen and his desire “to change the world / with nothing more than air”, encounters his muse, dead friends and even Billy Collins along the way. Funny, moving, thought-provoking, it’s quite a trip indeed, on which we’re all beginners, hitchhiking our way across time.

–Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and founder/director of The Writers Studio.

From the vantage point of his sixties, PJ Krass returns, in these wonderfully allusive poems, to his childhood in the 60s, that time of incense and headshops and Beatles and Stones in which both his selves, “the holy one / and the sinner,” were shaped by a pop culture that zigzagged toward a “seemingly solid adult world.” Then and now “a nation torn in two,” this America of “disappointed dirt” still offers its muted pleasures: “Even the fortune teller’s booth, / boarded up and empty, / keeps a secret of the past.” That secret is almost revealed in elegiac poems tempered with humor and scored, always, with “a music strange but welcoming.”

–Michael Waters, author of “Caw” and other books of poetry; co-editor of “Border Lines: Poems of Migration” and other anthologies; Guggenheim Fellow; and five-time Pushcart Prize recipient.