One of These Things Is Not Like the Other by Kurt Luchs

“Kurt Luchs’ poems are saturated with a hilarious and disturbing surrealism (think Charles Simic meets Bugs Bunny). But just as you’ve acclimated to that world, moments of genuine tenderness pop up here and there and completely disarm you. Read these verses to learn why we should all stop reading the news and start worshiping cats ASAP.”

–Katie Burgess, Editor, Emrys Journal

“Kurt Luchs is preoccupied with love, natural history, and the world’s absurdity. Often playful, sometimes unsettling, and always accessible these quirky poems speak news of the apocalypse, offer scary sales pitches, and advise how to practice mindfulness in a world gone mad. Whether discoursing to a lover about Ancestor.com test results and his percentage of Neanderthal DNA, solving the problem of how disturbing, painted images keep appearing above the baby’s crib, or relaying to the reader a conversation between himself and a gray fox, Luchs’ wry poems will woo, charm and even instruct.”

–Dave Mehler, Editor, Triggerfish Critical Review

“It should be no great surprise that Kurt Luchs, a master of comic writing, would bring to his poetic work equal mastery of craft. In these poems, language, sense and imagination exist in an exquisite, mutually respectful balance, deftly woven from conversational, observational, and reflective elements. Nor is it unexpected that his poetry would also reveal a humorous sensibility. But it might not be so easily predicted that this humor would run so deep, not so much gunning for laughs on the surface (although that is not forbidden territory), but more pervasively in his outlook on the world: in the quality of his discovery of things, his switches of perspective, the connections he draws between incommensurable ranges of experience, incidental, historic, personal and cosmic, and his ultimately accepting stance in relation to it all. His modesty and sincerity before the mysterious and intractable is both hard-learned wit and natural piety, suggesting that the world, alien, ungainly — ‘Strange, beautiful, and terrifying’ — must be embraced even if ‘the quartz does not include me / in its white dreams.’ ”

–Jacob Smullyan, author of Errata and Publisher/Editor of Sagging Meniscus Press