Good, H: frowny face

The double threat that is Howie Good is on full-tilt boogie display in this uber-cool combo of prose poetry and original collage. Good is a master of both genres, and this collection sings with the beautiful exchange of words and images on every page. From the stark horror of everyday headlines to nursery rhymes to clocks that strike thirteen, Good takes us everywhere his imagination wants, always with his signature punch of the unexpected. Laid out in an almost storybook manner, frowny face will take you back in some comforting way to when you were little, curled up, and wanting to hear a favorite story read to you just once more. And one more time after that. This book is a triumph, to be sure.

– Francine Witte, author of Just Outside the Tunnel of Love

Howie Good’s new prose poem collection, frowny face, portrays a baleful world whose ominous sights and scenes haunt an often-perplexed speaker who, despite their puzzlement, is a precise observer of, and brilliant guide through, an apocalyptic darkness. Illustrated by Good’s cannily collaged images, frowny face leads the reader through a menacing dusk in which “every street is a crime scene, every person both suspect and victim,” toward a searing light that reveals “the world is still a funny kind of free.”

—Brad Rose, author of Lucky Animals and No. Wait. I Can Explain

Finding power in brevity, Howie Good’s frowny face attacks the reader with a seemingly clashing juxtaposition of words and images, causing us to linger for longer on each and unearth new meaning amid myrioramas of apocalypse, advertisements, classic paintings, and displaced figures. A triumph of Weltschmerz and humor.

— Colin Dardis, author of The Dogs of Humanity and the x of y