Reviews of Self-Portrait as Jerry Quarry
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“The monsters and heros, sometimes inseparable, that populate this book rise up, are beaten down, and rise up again in a raw and flooded mythos. With a darting, weaving musicality, sometimes talky, sometimes demonically convoluted, these poems roar and splinter. If they weren't so funny, they’d be terrifying–and they are. If they weren't so terrifying, they’d be funny–and they are. Vito Aiuto's voice comes to us from the epicenter of a concussive beauty. Get ready to be hit.”

—Dean Young

“The poems in Self-Portrait as Jerry Quarry explore issues of God and Faith, of art and the everyday, of what it means to struggle with the limitations of being human (and, paradoxically, the beauty that goes with those limitations). This is the work of a poet who veers wildly between the conversational and the lyric mode, often with comic or heartbreaking results. Aiuto’s poems are devotional and blasphemous at the same time, because he’s so damn unpretentious, from the tip of his blue-collar boots to the hands he uses to pray. And Vito himself is one of the hippest poets I know of, clever and urbane. I hear echoes of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, but also David Foster Wallace and J.D. Salinger, and it makes for a new kind of music.”

—David Dodd Lee