New York and Other Lovers

"In poems that are in turn part Frank O'Hara, part Woody Allen and part Frank Sinatra, George Guida gives us a book that celebrates love and New York. Unabashed and joyously unapologetic in its romanticism, New York and Other Lovers builds a cityscape of poems where we may all fall head over heels."

   -Gerry LaFemina, author of

The Story of Ash, Vanishing Horizons and

Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poetry and Thinking Lyrically

"New York and Other Lovers gives us what the title promises and more; it's a love letter to NYC and its residents, past and present, with all their flaws and foibles. It's a book only a New Yorker could write, someone intimate with the subways, streets, and smells. In the tradition of Ginsburg and O'Hara (there's a poem dedicated to each of them in the collection), Guida's universe is vast and varied. From unrequited and lost lovers to the collapsed Twin Towers, Guida's poems work an alchemy like Proust's madeleine to conjure all that haunts us. With empathy, imagination, and wit, he reminds us that we "once had a home."

   -Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift and Looming

"Sometimes they lurch, sometimes they bop. But George Guida's New York poems never stop moving, never give up the restless, relentless pace that is the city. Even when they find a bench, a lover to sing or talk to, the frenetic undertow is ever-present, the heart humming a love song under the bridge, the current taking it uptown and down, and crosstown, where the poet hangs with those whose lives may be lonely, too.

Boro by boro, he takes us to places he loved but now is disappointed in. 'Brooklyn has lost its strut,' he says. But this is still a place for the brokenhearted- 'I don't believe in love/I've tasted it in overnight hot bagels.' Guida makes the city complicit in these betrayals: '...to hang from a white stone ledge by fingernails/above the scene we want to call home.' Still, she's the backdrop he details with great affection, that makes heartache bearable, after all."

-Mervyn Taylor, author of No Back Door and The Waving Gallery