Streets and San by John S. O’Connor

John S. O’Connor’s Streets and San maps out a psychic cityscape that is also an actual one, Chicago’s lakeside grid, and courageously confronts the detritus of a childhood ravished by a father’s alcoholic abuse, while also working to overcome that same trauma—not to sanitize but to make sane again—in order to be a good father to his children. In poems that manifest in myriad forms, and with a lyric line that can dance from colloquial plainsong to bluesy, high-lyric snap, O’Connor creates a book of immediate poetic pleasures and lasting emotional resonance, a guidebook of a kind, teaching us how to accept our past while stepping kindly, generously, care-fully, into our most present life

–Dan Beachy-Quick, author of How to Draw A Circle: On Reading and Writing

From “a streetlamp silhouetted by falling snow” to “pine trees, pining” [O’Connor’s writing] is the sort of poetry that demands to come into existence, find its reader, to take root in the imagination that we may see more deeply

–Richard Jones, author of Passport

O’Connor’s poems are closely attuned to memory and to language. He goes inside the paradoxes and ironies of words, and inside their precision and their inadequacy when we try to shape a memory into meaning. But he does shape it, and beautifully. From the way the past simply insists on being felt and thought, he makes poems both memorable and deft. Time mocks the past, but these are the kind of artistic mementos that save it, that adorn our inner lives with images worthy of remembrance.

–Reginald Gibbons, author of Young Woman with a Cane