Book Description

Laska has written works alternately described as bold and memorable and with a hair-raising comic vitality. Given the complexity of his occasionally dark, unabashedly political, philosophical and underground writings, he can be described as an Appalachian Fyodor Dostoyevsky. --Jeff Biggers, Contributing Editor to The Bloomsbury Review

Collection Overview

Eschewing conventional poetic fashion, Laska's engaging collection of over three decades of writings in the shadow of corporate domination is a sweeping poetic and prosaic, lyrical and anti-lyrical assemblage of thought-provoking epigrams, puns, and philosophical dialogues, together with voices and vignettes of a by-passed America. From the stripped-mined hills and hollows of Appalachia to the banal debris of urban streets, his work unfolds, with respectful understatement, the on-going global desecration of inner and outer life. With patient yet alarmed urgency he brings to the surface an ecological counter-tradition whose contours trace back as far as the ancient Chinese Dao De Jing. -- Csaba Polony, Editor, Left Curve

NIGHT & DAY

is an iconoclastic 35-year poetic chronicle of America's OCD. With a smiling grimace the author journeys to the psychological interior of the Homeland, sees through the nation's repetition compulsion and self-protective historical amnesia, and returns with Zen-like epigrams, satires, dialogues, and a set of healing philosophical Maxims of Access.

Book Review

The Past Finds Its Way Home, September 23, 2010 By Sacramento Book Review

"Sacramento Book Review" (Sacramento, CA)

This review is from: Night & Day: A collection of poems (Paperback) by P. J. Laska

"O the fabulous histories of fleeting things remain, each once and ever instant effervescent, like the faces you'll remember years hence when the hills are mythic fictions of the night sky--/a moon will rise in memory over Morgantown, and you'll be thinking/what if what if what if..."

P.J. Laska's collection of poems is a tour de force in the examination of a disappearing homeland, the government's gross and compulsive negligence, and the way back to a place of home through philosophical musings. Laska has portrayed a fertile landscape of a working-class citizenship; coal miners, janitors, salesmen across the rich diversities of the Appalachians. But it could be anywhere, anywhere there is history and the undying thirst to regain its story.

Night & Day is a revolutionary documentary shaped by Laska's skill and free-thinking awareness. He has crafted this collection into three very distinct and thought-provoking sections, each lending a vivid picture created on a palette of carefully blended "anti-lyrics." His style reaches from haiku to epigrammatic dialogue to philosophical conversations to a one-act play. The different forms make for a seamless flow and keep the reader engaged in an almost voyeuristic indulgence. The images are seen, felt, and experienced, "Quick-dipping/their heads, they/roll silvery drops/down their backs/then shimmy/the dust/from their wings." His eye for the senses is clearly evident, a profound craftsmanship on each page. The main theme points to loss and the restitution of a culture, a reinstatement of what has vanished, what has been taken, or rather, an intense look back at a sober lingering. The government's involvement is one of disdain, but what strikes me is the search for meaning through philosophical traditions, the hope for a return to nature, and what is whole from a place of drought. In many ways, these poems are odes and pieces of the subject's soul. This is a call, an invitation, to query. I accept.