Glass-Bottom Boat

“The wonderful poems in Glass-Bottom Boat are the poems of a man married to the domestic joys of being a son and father; the joys of jazz, marriage, and sweet married sex; the joys of responsibility so lovingly embraced that the love subsumes obligation.  Andrew Hudgins ”Asarnow’s poems are by turns tender, jocular, formally elegant, and wryly ironic. They sizzle like sparks from the spirit meant to remind us OF the spirit. There is a humane and mature intelligence everywhere in these pages. ”  Nance Van Winckel “In “Argument (Empirical) Favoring the Existence of a Soul,” this wise, musical voice tells us that life is “a multiplicity of wonderings.” Glass-Bottom Boat is, itself, a trove of wonderful wonderings. A gift to us all.”  Paulann Petersen “Maybe these poems are glass: furiously made, blurred, coming clear. Through them, we begin to see what Herman Asarnow sees  flashes of childhood and married love, nature and art, how what is mortal in us locks and unlocks. There’s a genuine quest in this work, musical and layered-rich.”  Marianne Boruch “ Sharply observational, witty, and affable, Asarnow invites us into the room of a dying parent, allows us to witness a son’s first true defiance of authority, the tenderness of a long marriage, and a host of other ordinary-seeming experiences made numinous by the poet’s quiet insistence on the linkage between imagination and mortality. It is this knowledge that gives the book its profundity and weight. “ – Chase Twichell