Reviews of Don Winter's "Saturday Night Desperate" and Ed Galing's "Burlesque"

( Don Winter)



( Ed Galing)


Saturday Night Desperate
A retrospective 1999-2009
Don Winter
Working Stiff Press
dansheridanwsp@yahoo.com

Winter is like a portrait painter. Unlike Edouard Vuillard or even Picasso, in which the light tends to be diffused, Winter, like Rembrandt, who touches the darkness with a brilliant orange light. Rembrandt’s characters are the ordinary workers of their day captured in light and focused on, as their background fades in subdued color and form.

Fishing Near Dark

The wind stiffens between my teeth.
I watch old men lean
into it, cast their lines
out of the shadows.
All afternoon
we fished, caught nothing.
I should turn back
to the cabin. But he breathes
below the surface.
I change bait and I cast.
If I could I’d pull
the water over my head.
Beneath the choking air
I’d wait, know everything that falls
becomes my food at last.

The poets’ pen misses nothing in the experiences of his working class people and his insights reveal the extra-ordinary

“a man slips
into his seat
with a sigh
like an accordion
folding into its case”

Irene Koronas
Submissions Editor
Ibbetson Street Press


burlesque
ed galing
iniquity press/vendetta books
isbn: 1-877968-33-1
2005 4.00

Ed Galing presents a time almost all of us have never heard of, or seen or been privy to, yet, his poems expose us to the bump and grind; strippers and comedians trying to entertain an audience of visually sex starved men. All this comes across in the poems. The reader will enjoy the show and will get acquainted with some of the characters behind the scenes. the poems look at life as it once was, naïve, compared to today.

“puttin the powder
on his scraggly
face

he looked at me
sadly and said

kid, whatever
you do,

don’t go into
burlesque”

Although the verse is brief in presentation, we the reader will come to understand what it means to reveal something never seen in public and we will dance with excitement.

“its only the chorus
girls, mostly,

who will go as far
as your money does.”

Irene Koronas
Submissions Editor
Ibbetson Street Press