Gerard Sarnat’s epic poems burst across the page with the glee usually reserved for shooting stars. This is a playful balls-out poet unafraid to temper bold statements with enough humor and compassion to make us nostalgic for his ecstatic profound view of life. He sings to us through the voice of a universal poet. Sarnat’s written one hell of an exciting book!

Gerry Sarnat’s tough, witty, language-obsessed poems are both a post-holocaust reconstruction of his family’s history and a progression towards a declaration of his own intention. In his seventh decade, after a medical career that included doctoring the homeless, the poet declares: “I must give birth.” I admire the skill of the poetry—often as precise as a diagnosis—as well as his labor-like decision. The poems may be unsentimental but they are also, importantly, emotional.

The epic poem HOMELESS CHRONICLES from Abraham to Burning Man … is an interesting foray into language. I can hear my tongue trying to form the words he uses like a rattler throatily teasing me from the first page of the book. From the Judean Desert of his heritage to Burning Man’s pagan artsy Black Rock Desert, this rattler charms you, scares you and tells you before it is coming, warning the imminent charge long before you get to the bloom of the poem’s end and see it for yourself. … The thrust of the book is this: Who do we tend to and why must we? … This book is a woven traffic of patterns he follows, synchronizing and priming through the forest of mankind, exposing us for the monkeys we are, and sometimes praising us along the battering route he has taken for being humane and human after all.