Zero Summer's skinny, sticky, cock-swaggering poems take 'bloody comfort' in Andrew Demcak's lubricated, literary longing, the bourbon 'sweet / with unimagined grief,' the very words 'laboring / over / the soup-bones of literature.' This is a book that will get under your fingernails. --Randall Mann, author of "Breakfast with Thom Gunn"
"Demcak continues to blossom as a poet of note with Zero Summer, his newest collection of pieces of imagination married to craftsmanship. These poems define lust, desire, onanism, finding and feeling and losing love affairs, childhood longings and memories - the sum of a sensual being. Demcak's range is from the lyrical ('Vincent V. in 1993') to the raw ('Venus in Furs'). He offers the rare opportunity to share the struggles of writing poetry, as in 'Automated Response to Mark Strand': 'the poem is a permission/given away'--and delves into current events--tragedies, disease, social injustices, world events that seem planets away until he stirs them into spells for the reader. Andrew Demcak has the gift and we are all richer for it"--Grady Harp
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