Endarkenment, The

Even if you count yourself among the unredeemed who claim they don't like poetry, buy this book anyway. It will convert you and install a skylight in your brain. Alive and kicking in these pages is the voice of a brilliantly comic consciousness. McDaniel is a candid, frisky survivor: hyperalert, conversant with drugs and sobriety, obscene phone call addicts, 'boner etiquette,' fatherhood, the special hell of family, being an 'emotional warrior' and so much more. He's an urban wordsmith of the first order. You hold in your hands his anguished autobiography, a smorgasbord of famished compassion, tenderness, luminous surprises, and armor-piercing humor. - Amy Gerstler ""It was an energetic moment when I encountered Jeffrey McDaniel for the first time. Even after a few lines it became obvious that he was someone who produced not only a very vivid but also innovative poetry. A fusion of pain and goodness, comic reliefs, and explosive moments on the crunchy surface of daily horrors/shocks."" - Ron Winkler, from the afterword to Katastrophenkunde ""McDaniel possesses one of the most extraordinary senses of metaphor in which I have ever taken delight. His work abounds in metaphor and simile, each or both always revealing an utterly lucid, rich, complex, passionate, contradictory, original way of confronting/praising this business of walking around on earth. Read his books, listen to him read his poems aloud: it will change you."" - Thomas Lux, from the introduction to The Spoken World Revolution: Slam, Hip-Hop, and the Poetry of a New Generation