Be Wary of the Elderly by Allan Appel

The energy and imagination of these poems is stunning, crammed full as they are with everything from aardvarks to dead friends, mothers and nightly suffering on the news, and the bittersweet price of growing older.  They keep running, running, towards and away from God, like prayers uttered under one’s breath in a marathon, and the effect overall is beatific, as they offer to us the welcome consolation of poetry.

–Phillip Lopate, author of A Year and a Day and A Mother’s Tale

Poignant, wistful, witty, in love with language play, and with the formal beauty of rhyming, Allan Appel invites the reader into enigmatic and paradoxical realms. With a dramatist’s gift running through his lines, and with the disturbance of normal prose syntax, he liberates his poems to make their meaning of pain, hunger, impoverishment and yearning.

–Marc Kaminsky, author of The Stones of Lifta

In his new poetry collection, Be Wary of the Elderly, Allan Appel takes on big themes – death, old age, plague, the Holocaust – but always with an eye to the personal. His large subjects are made meaningful to the reader because they are made concrete and palpable. Honed to an ironic edge, sometimes outright funny, but always with deep empathy, these poems reveal the tragedy of the human condition at its most grandiose and also at its most mundane.

–Judith Liebmann, author of Ekphrasis, and Poet Laureate of Branford, CT

Be Wary of the Elderly offers dark and sardonic portraits of complex family history and dynamics, the pandemic, being husband, parent, grandparent . . . Aging and mortality make frequent appearances hovering over a collection of mordant yet whimsical wit. ‘Superhero Sonnet” will shake any sentient reader to the core!

–Melanie Greenhouse, author of Republic of Sunlight