Ain’t No Angel Gonna Greet Me by Leonard Gontarek

Praise For Leonard Gontarek’s Poetry


“Deliberate, bare, and infused with a searing humor, these poems hiss and bloom at the same time.”

—Ada Limón, United States Poet Laureate


Leonard Gontarek is a rare poet who can write complex poems and still be accessible. His poems disarm us, and it’s surprisingly pleasurable. As he proceeds, elements that felt random become meaningful. Gontarek’s keen ear for musicality, voicing, and diction—as well as the immediacy of his imagery—engages us and propels the book. His subject is epic: how consciousness can be depicted and can poetry make us more humane. Gontarek’s book couldn’t be more timely or more necessary.

—Randall Potts, author of Trickster



Leonard Gontarek is the author of eight books of poems, including The Long Way Home; Take Your Hand Out of My Pocket, Shiva; and The Paris Poems of Jim Morrison. His poems have appeared in Field, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, Fence, Poetry Northwest, American Poetry Review, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, and The Best American Poetry (edited by Paul Muldoon).

He coordinates Peace/Works, Poetry In Common, Philly Poetry Day, hosts The Green Line Reading & Interview Series, and was Poetry Consultant for Whitman at 200: Art and Democracy. He conducts the poetry workshop: Making Poems That Last.                   

Gontarek has received Poetry fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the
Mudfish Poetry Prize, the Philadelphia Writers Conference Community Service Award, and was a Literary Death Match Champion.

His poem, 37 Photos From The Bridge, selected by Alice Quinn, was a Poetry winner for the Big Bridges MotionPoems project and the basis for the award-winning film sponsored by the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. [http://movingpoems.com/2015/10/thirty-seven-photos-from-the-bridge-by-leonard-gontarek/]


Book Information:

· Paperback: 248 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-501-4

$22