The Man Who Thought he was Tarzan

by David Garrett Izzo

1992: The story centers on high school students and a beloved teacher, Mr. Navarre, a skilled martial artist, who has a mysterious past that was taken away from him by amnesia following an explosion that was an attempted murder but did kill the woman he loved. His past haunts his present and the dangerous enemies he faced years before will return to threaten him and his students Within the forgotten memories was a time as a teenager who, after the traumatic sudden death of his mother believed he was someone else to forget his grief and protect his working class Queens, NY neighborhood from thugs. Now in his adult present three of his students are kidnapped by an old foe; he knows he must save them but this will require that his memory comes back so that he becomes once again The Man Who Thought He was Tarzan. This novella is a tribute to traditional heroes, loyal friendships, close knit neighborhoods, and the virtues of honor, justice and courage for those readers who are young and the still young-at-heart who love comic book characters that are all too human and not just invincible. Today they are represented on TV with the Flash and The Green Arrow and movies like Spiderman and the Batman Trilogy. The story thrives on the details of the writer's experiences as an English teacher and his realistic depictions of students is based on this.

83 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

About the author

David Garrett Izzo is an English Professor emeritus who has published three novels, three plays, five short stories, and 17 poems, as well as 16 books and 60 essays of literary scholarship. David has published extensively on the Perennial Spiritual Philosophy of Mysticism (Vedanta) as applied to literature. He is inspired by Aldous Huxley, as well as Bruce Springsteen, his wife Carol and their five cats: Huxley, Max, Princess, Phoebe, and Luca. Two of his novels are fantasies with cats as characters: Maximus in Catland (compared to C.S. Lewis) and Purring Heights. The third is a historical novel about Huxley and peers, Details and reviews at www.davidgarrettizzo.com

January 2017
Poems: (see photo)
Permutations Among the
Nightingales
Winner of the Vibrant Poetic Voices Award
Shade Seekers Press No. 2

Advance Praise:

With remarkable elan, David Garrett Izzo unfolds the secret origami of our minds and constitutions in his new book, Permutations among the Nightingales. It’s a fierce collection of philosophical raps, tributes to culture heroes, and the naked autobiography of a man to whom life has given both great pain and great pleasure. Reading Izzo’s poems, you wind up in unexpected places, for he is one of the great secrets of American literature.
Kevin Killian, November 2016.

(Kevin Killian is an American poet, author, editor, and playwright. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009.)

The poems in David Izzo’s Permutations Among the Nightingales are full-voiced and whole-hearted. They range from quiet meditations--on teaching, on power, on poetry--to unabashed celebrations of the poet’s heroes—Springsteen, Auden, Huxley, and less famous exemplars of the twin arts of seeing clearly and living consciously. In a time when much poetry is guarded and cautious, these brave poems don’t flinch from expressing the big emotions—heartbreak, gratitude, rage, tenderness.
April Lindner, December 2016

(April Lindner’s first collection of poetry, won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize, Skin (2002). In 2010, she published a young adult novel, Jane. She teaches at St Joseph’s University, Pennsylvania.)