The Westchester enclave of faux-Tudor houses and perfected lawns has been invaded in Lee Stockdale’s darkly comic book, by the anxious dreams of a bewildered, newly fatherless young man who sees right through the surface to the murk below. Ironic, matter-of-fact in the weirdest circumstances, these poems catch just how it feels to be the kid who’ll never fit in, and the adult dreamer who carries that youthful insight into a life.
– Mark Doty,
T.S. Eliot Prize,
National Book Award Winner
In this poetry of endless possibilities, Lee Stockdale has crafted a trickster world made fresh with longing and stocked with everything a traveler could ever need. Guided by hope and preparation, the poet finds praise in strange places and turns deserts into regenerative power stations.
– Mildred Kiconco Barya,
author of Hands in Clay
Bronxville showcases Stockdale’s zany humor, original imagination, and sharp wit. Yet, the poet does not stop there. Stockdale’s large, aching heart enters the mix to raise the stakes and charge his poems with profound emotional poignancy as he revisits his father’s suicide, his mother’s abandoned poems, and a forced departure from his endearing childhood home.
– Yehoshua November,
author of The Concealment
of Endless Light
These finely wrought poems resonate with the twin specters of human existence: loss and grief. A surreal treatise on the isolation and loneliness brought on by technology, where we know our friends by their online avatars, and chatbots chirp in to answer both our most mundane and burning questions.
– Andrew Clark,
author of Where Dark Things Rise
It's hard to be wise and in love at the same time, but Lee Stockdale manages to find just the right tone as he navigates the reader around the real Bronxville neighborhood that he survived, and the mythical one that has grown prominently in the redemptive forces of his memory and imagination. You will never find a more loving tour guide.
– Keith Flynn,
author of The Skin of Meaning,
Editor, The Asheville Poetry Review
Lee Stockdale, in his stark and memorable volume, Gorilla, takes head-on, fearlessly, the specter of mortality that looms and lords above us all. He dares it again and again and, ultimately, spits in its eye—with harrowing, surreal, and deadpan matter-of-fact razor-diction. Gorilla underscores the imagination’s dogged grip on survival, language’s alchemy in forging cosmos from chaos, how the spirit moves and bears witness.
– Joseph Bathanti,
author of Light at the Seam
Stockdale’s poems are sharp and witty, at times tender and heartbreaking. These beautifully crafted poems give testament to William Faulkner’s assessment of the human spirit—a spirit that will not only endure but prevail.
– Cathy Smith Bowers,
author of Like Shining from Shook Foil
In Lee Stockdale’s Gorilla national and personal traumas merge and deflect in surprising ways that are variously poignant, witty, or coruscating, yet always urgent, and enthralling. Stockdale edges along the borders of civic and intimate life, an American family and the American Empire. The irradiated core is an astonishing, multivalent story that is equal parts a childhood fable, his ancestral chronicle, and our collective hallucination.
– Robert Polito,
author of Hollywood & God
