Flowers

“All my poet friends mourned when Paul told us he’d be going into law, so soon after he appeared on the scene as a supernova. ‘No fear. The blue light. My breath washing out in the air.’ Yes. He came out strengthened. Grown in imagination. Bigger in his lucid scanning of America. Rejuvenating. To read him is a delight.” - Tomaz Salamun “I thought: ‘this is an anecdotal phenomenology’ and looked up the derivation of anecdote: ‘thing given out.’ These poems keep giving and giving out; anecdotes evaporate and recrudesce in a different form, in new detail. Meaning emerges as each observation defamiliarizes the next and the prior. An epistemology punctured with an affectionate loathing opens out into love. Agonized, startled, startling wit. Truthtelling that fails because it’s truthful. These poems leave me alert to the floating world. Welcome Paul Killebrew, tabula rascal.” - Catherine Wagner “[Killebrew] plunges us into a world we inhabit but seldom notice, forcing its horror on us but also reminding us why we go on coping with it, why we’re in it for the long haul, wherever the carpool takes us.” - John Ashbery