Pettygod

The poems in Andrew E. Colarusso''s Pettygod are irrepressible, holy, profane, tender, hilarious, "too hot to touch."_x000D__x000D_"Andrew E. Colarusso''s newest is a sharp-edged erotic, politically unflinching poetry collection where syntax is shattered to reveal deeper ancestral reckoning. Like Kamau Brathwaite, Colarusso understands the page as a score to conjure rebellion, bend grammar, break form, and tune the line to the frequency of diaspora, confessional grief, and spiritual survival. His language pulses with both prophecy and protest, as seen in poems like ''The Pussy Detective,'' which blends pulp poetics, satire and sovereignty, and refuses the sanitized gaze of empire while regarding the vernacular as sacred terrain. In ''Who Hath Known the Mind of God,'' the writer reckons despair and the brutal intimacy of city life as it unfolds into a fever dream of love and despair. Across his work, interiority becomes a site of disruption, therefore, Pettygod be a living archive for the haunted and the holy. Colarusso scribes like fire, raising sacred spaces from ash, where fracture and ruin form the raw scaffolding of a resilient desire to be free."—Mahogany L. Browne