Unusual Woods

History with its betrayals lurks behind Gene Tanta, lends his writing wisdom and gravity, but he's also playful and wickedly humorous. Infused with a deft surrealism, these subtle yet startling poems are like parables, brief films, elegant dreams, baffling skirmishes or erotic near misses. They demand and reward repeated readings. -Linh Dinh. Gene Tanta's Unusual Woods is just that, a journey through the dark forest of the poet's mind. Tanta's poems are at once playful and haunting,...
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History with its betrayals lurks behind Gene Tanta, lends his writing wisdom and gravity, but he's also playful and wickedly humorous. Infused with a deft surrealism, these subtle yet startling poems are like parables, brief films, elegant dreams, baffling skirmishes or erotic near misses. They demand and reward repeated readings. -Linh Dinh. Gene Tanta's Unusual Woods is just that, a journey through the dark forest of the poet's mind. Tanta's poems are at once playful and haunting, turning the everyday into the grotesque, the carnivalesque, the beautiful. His is a world in which, "sometimes the squeaky wheel / gets the hammer." A speaker in one of Tanta's poems says, "I too want to fully conjugate the human heart." In Unusual Woods, in Tanta's unique way, a way simultaneously foreboding and alluring, he already has. -Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time