EVERYTHING IS OBVIOUS AFTER IT HAPPENS by Mark Gosztyla

These poems are like those tiny fireworks wrapped in white paper: tiny, unassuming bundles that explode if you snap them between your fingers. Here, Gosztyla has mastered a syntax of magical compression – of contortion, too. As he bends language in ways that delight and unsettle, the laws of gravity become so surreal, you can almost drink the sky.

–MRB Chelko

Mark Gosztyla is the zeitgeist collagist you didn’t know you needed. Here, at every turn, without contrivance or sentiment, he deftly lays bare our sparkling ennui and our oversaturated collective psyche: “pop lyrics and error messages” and “a verbal altercation over who’s more vegetarian.” These are salty, irreverent, often laugh-out-loud prose poems I want to live with in all the rooms of my daily life. So, I guarantee, will you.

–Debora Kuan

Trying to set the record straight, that’s the feel of things here.  Trying to catch up, so you can get ahead.  Trying to suss it out.  Now!  The life you came to lead, or the life that comes to lead you?  It’s all here, in these brilliant, funny, stinging, sad, shrewd, totally alive and kicking poems.  This short book more full of magical transformations than a psilocybin mushroom.  This book written by a saint, not an angel: Mark Gosztyla, the American great-grandson of Max Jacob.

–David Rivard