Prague Winter

Author: Richard Katrovas

Quote: ...and suddenly I thought that here at last I'd done it, I'd finally pissed off someone with a weapon and the will to use it, after years of mouthing off in biker bars and leaning on my horn in New Orleans--where once good men got lynched for less--after a youth of not caring whom I angered and well into middle life unscarred, unbowed, in Prague, in summer, I would die of road rage...

Why you should read this book: Richard Katrovas is equally unafraid of picking fights with strangers, friends, colleagues, lovers, and himself and he writes fearless poems with brute honesty, mocking his own temper and taking refuge in moments of tenderness. Read together, these poems tell the story of a decade, give or take, in which the poet follows his heart to a country he knows nothing about, trading his childless marriage for a new family conceived on the night of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. Along the way, he eulogizes fallen friends, ridicules his passion, dabbles in history, and describes his experience in a nation brand new, and unknowably ancient.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You have no sympathy for adulterers.