Ruthless

by Jeff Mock, Deborah Keenan (Selected by)

Poetry. RUTHLESS, Jeff Mock's first collection, was chosen by Deborah Keenan as the winner of the Three Candles Press Open Book Award, and for good reason: it is a tour de force of style and substance. Through Mock's darkly comic "what if" verse, we are given escapades of a risen Lazarus, adventures of The Brothers Grimm in Hollywood, and self-portraits ranging from a noxious weed to Miss America. His poems are unsparing and brutal, yet deftly written, humorous, and in the end, they offer slices of life from the full range of human experience. Mock's is a book of dreams and vignettes, danger and passion, self-aggrandizement and -deprecation. "Life is good," Mock writes in "Self Portrait Running With Scissors." Yes, it is good; we know it is. As Alan Michael Parker writes, it is "A book of splendid insurrections--of rebellion and revivification--Jeff Mock's Ruthless haunts us gleefully, with poems that read on even when the lights are off." It is a book of satisfying rewards.

92 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Ace]

I'm not a huge poetry reader but I picked this collection up after attending one of Jeff Mock's readings, and it didn't disappoint. I've only read through it once so far, but I'll definitely read it again; Mock's poems are so dense and thought-provoking and complex that it's not possible to dissect them completely after one reading - and maybe it won't be possible even after ten. Mock doses his poems with humor, keeping this collection lively and entertaining though it touches upon a number of complicated, deep topics.

[Bookworm Jones]

Far out.

[Aedy]

“Jeff Mock Running with a Pair of Scissors”