Ruthless

Poetry. RUTHLESS, Jeff Mock's first collection, was chosen by Deborah Keenan as the winner of the Three Candles Press Open Book Award, and for good reason: it is a tour de force of style and substance. Through Mock's darkly comic "what if" verse, we are given escapades of a risen Lazarus, adventures of The Brothers Grimm in Hollywood, and self-portraits ranging from a noxious weed to Miss America. His poems are unsparing and brutal, yet deftly written, humorous, and in the end, they offer slices of life from the full range of human experience. Mock's is a book of dreams and vignettes, danger and passion, self-aggrandizement and -deprecation. "Life is good," Mock writes in "Self Portrait Running With Scissors." Yes, it is good; we know it is. As Alan Michael Parker writes, it is "A book of splendid insurrections--of rebellion and revivification--Jeff Mock's Ruthless haunts us gleefully, with poems that read on even when the lights are off." It is a book of satisfying rewards.