David Garrett Izzo

David Garrett Izzo has published five novels, three plays, five short stories, 17 individual poems, and a volume of poetry, as well as 17 books and 60 essays of literary scholarship. David has published extensively on the Perennial Spiritual Philosophy of Mysticism (Vedanta) as applied to literature. He is inspired by Aldous Huxley, Bruce Springsteen, his wife Carol and their five cats: Huxley, Max, Princess, Phoebe, and Luca. Two of his novels are fantasies with cats as characters: Maximus in Catland and Purring Heights. His new volume of verse, Permutations Among the Nightingales, early 2017. www.davidgarrettizzo.com

Advance Praise:

With remarkable elan, David Garrett Izzo unfolds the secret origami of our minds and constitutions in his new book, Permutations among the Nightingales. It’s a fierce collection of philosophical raps, tributes to culture heroes, and the naked autobiography of a man to whom life has given both great pain and great pleasure. Reading Izzo’s poems, you wind up in unexpected places, for he is one of the great secrets of American literature.

Kevin Killian, November 2016.

(Kevin Killian is an American poet, author, editor, and playwright. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009.)

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The poems in David Garrett Izzo’s Permutations Among the Nightingales are full-voiced and whole-hearted. They range from quiet meditations--on teaching, on power, on poetry--to unabashed celebrations of the poet’s heroes—Springsteen, Auden, Huxley, and less famous exemplars of the twin arts of seeing clearly and living consciously. In a time when much poetry is guarded and cautious, these brave poems don’t flinch from expressing the big emotions—heartbreak, gratitude, rage, tenderness.

April Lindner, December 2016

(April Lindner’s first collection of poetry, won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize, Skin (2002). In 2010, she published a young adult novel, Jane. She teaches at St Joseph’s University, Pennsylvania.)