Jeff Alessandrelli

This Last Time Will Be the First Jeff Alessandrelli

Poetry. THIS LAST TIME WILL BE THE FIRST TIME is on the move and making connections. It looks like a perfect pitch. A perfect pitch is only so with contact, with connection. These poems are for contact and making connections, and refusing connections, wanting connections, and denying connections, loving connections, reinventing connections. Alessandrelli writes, 'I am squinting into the faint radiance / of the sun, its light / trying to shine'--THIS LAST TIME WILL BE THE FIRST TIME is full of resolutely flickering light. These poems are at work with Emerson's idea that, 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.' The mind at work in these poems is not little. It is expansive, it is growing, it is looking to love.--Emily Pettit

Continue on with your impulse to buy this book. You will learn things reading it and feel a little smarter, and that is a special kind of pleasure. Jeff Alessandrelli does a beautiful job using others' lines and styles as a jumping-off point for his own poems. And though they are homages, they are always totally surprising, and totally his. They are not a game. Alessandrelli is a real human being, unlike the authors of some other poetry books you might be considering right now. Put them down. They do not, underneath their stylistic pyrotechnics, have a beating heart.--Matthew Rohrer