Sample Poems from Books-scroll down to see book information
All these books are available from Amazon or by ordering directly from the poet:
at tfusco357@gmail.com
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Lost in the Brain FogLost in the Brain Fog is the sixth book of Poetry by Tony Fusco- featuring several list poems written during the 2020-2021 Covid 19 lockdowns as well as poems in his usual and unique brand of humor and striking images. The book includes Under House Arrest, a poem expressing the feeling of isolation shared by so many during the beginning of the second year of lockdown, 13 Blackbirds Talk Back to Wallace Stevens and the Canonization of Judas or Witness for the Prosecution, Billy Collins Dog Ate My Manuscript and the Power of Positive Winking are testament to the tongue in cheek humor that Fusco is known for. Throw back memories of the beginning of dating are moving in Bobby Steven's Birthday Party and finding comfort in a comfort dog while Standing in Line at a Funeral all are insights into the universal experiences the poets shares with his readers.
Don't Make Me LaughPublished in 2019 but book launch delayed because of Covid, Tony Fusco’s Don’t Make Me Laugh there is a fascinating tension between comedy and anguish that proves that life never pauses, nor does the imagination of this writer whose honesty combined with self-knowledge reflects like a fun-house mirror, with fright in his humor and wisdom in his wit. Throughout this collection he dares us to look into that mirror and not blink. Always questioning, Tony Fusco is a master of daydreams whose “book of fairy tales is missing pages.” His characters inhabit the world of “what ifs.” He begs to live “In a Perfect World” where “the person who cuts the lunch line/ends up with the moldy bread, the turned milk.” Yet we are drawn to Fusco’s world where a mountain is an “under achiever” and vegetables are compared to people: “It’s not that I dislike vegetables…/It is kind of like people–/as individuals, some of them aren’t so bad/ but as a group they can be horrible.” His “Autobiography” speaks to all of us: “I have threaded on the rehab treadmill/sweated on the stationary bike/peddling like mad, but getting nowhere fast.” He pits his mortality against Big Pharma in “Breakfast Pill Rap,” yet in his penultimate poem, “Tuck Me In,” his tone softens as he confesses: “I will remember beyond the grave/one kiss that took as much as gave.” Indeed this poet’s life’s experiences result in a collection rich in humor and sadness, slices of life served up on a plateful of truth and dare. The inner workings of the mind of this poet genius give us a thrill ride on the merry-go-round of life, and we don’t want to get off. –Pat Mottola, author of After Hours ExtinctionThe Apocalypse is coming and it rhymes! Meet the Last Dancing
Witch, The Seven Deadly Sins, The Day of the Dead, That Kind of Woman and A Man Like Him among other poems that are serious, witty, clever political and social satire and observations by this an award winning and much talked about Connecticut writer. Tony Fusco’s book of poems, Extinction, includes brilliant political poems as well as heart-wrenching poems of love and loss. Fusco’s voice is original, lyrical, unforgettable. I love the sheer energy of it and the bravery. Bravo! -Maria Mazziotti Extinction, is a compelling commentary on the state of the world and the world beyond, Tony Fusco’s eye offers a kind of seeing that proves him a master of the unknown. Writing with heart and humanity, Fusco asks us our own unanswerable questions. His poems, brilliant between the lines, are lifelines tossed to lost souls. In “The Greatest Generation” he juxtaposes characters, from “the homeless in cardboard boxes” to “refugees in inflatable rafts” to “those sleeping on satin sheets.” Drawn in by human need and the fragility of life, the reader is driven to ponder what is dream and what is reality. In “Self-Made Man,” the speaker take us where “the past is all those lost childhood wishes on a star” and professes “I am more than a collection of everything I have encountered.” Both sage and seer, Tony Fusco shares his understanding of the world through humor and introspection and grace that shows he is not afraid of the dark. Indeed, he is a pied piper whom every reader will follow, knowing that “though the long shadows stretch/so far, when the light is gone/they will never reach into tomorrow.”-Patricia Mottola Tony Fusco’s new book, Extinction, is a sonic romp through contemporary culture. From poems about romance to political satire, Fusco uses rhyme, repetition, and startling imagery to take the reader beyond the expected. When he says: “I want to be your spike-heel shoes/your morning news/your exotic island cruise,” we long to jump into this imaginative courtship. In Extinction, the title poem, all manner of life cry out for some type of salvation, including couples in soup kitchens, crated chickens, and a thawing tundra. The poem ends with God’s reaction, which is to “throw a stone at the world.” Yet Fusco’s book is not a rant or a hopeless dirge. It brims with life and the indomitable spirit of the beauty of language. Beneath it all, Extinction seems to offer its consolation: as long as we have rhyme, all will be fine. –Christine Beck |
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Java Scripture
The poems in this memorable collection fulfill the promise of the title, Java Scripture, by giving comfort and stimulation to the body and solace to the soul. Voices in the poems are those you might overhear in a coffee shop where people come not just for espresso, cappuccino or a turbo, but for companionship, for communion and often for confession in order to cleanse the spirit. Through specific detail, Fusco recreates an era. Like the photographer, Dorthea Lange, Fusco never crops the ragged edge of truth. Java Scripture is a vivid and compelling collection because Tony Fusco’s poems are solid, because they are true.- Vivian Shipley
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Java Scripture Page
2014 Java Scripture
Java Scripture shows poet Tony Fusco at his best, juggling ironic commentary on contemporary society with questions about youth, aging, and family connection. The poem that gives the book its name posits a creator making a world that runs on caffeine. Whether pondering the 60s culture or the irony of aging in The Joy of Sex Generation, Fusco’s trademark wit is on full display. His social conscience emerges in such poems as Shoeless and Second Amendment Rights and Wrongs. But he is at his best when these themes unite, as in Those Understanding Bending Language, as Falling Secrets or Thaw, and when they crystallize in images of mystery and loss like “captured twigs in holes in the cold plate/small boundaries around their waists . . . as they strain for freedom/from the grip, loose but captured”. - Christine Beck I love the way Tony Fusco in Java Scripture takes us on a journey into the past, a journey that leads us to a textured, evocative world that calls up our own memories of times past. This books moves back and forth in time so we see the world through the shifting perspective of a man who is moving through middle-age, feel his regret for all he has done and failed to do. throughout the book, the poet uses sly humor and sardonic wit as counterbalance to the emotions he expresses. This is a work to read and savor as if it were a cup of excellent espresso. Bravo!!!- Maria Mazziotti Gillan |
Sample Poems from these books below - scroll down
Droplines"In Droplines, Tony Fusco breathes life and textured detail into his memories of the past. The sounds and smells and places that are connected with his childhood, his ancestors, and all the people he loves and treasures rise from these pages like the immensely satisfying aroma of baking bread. These poems needed to be written and this is a book not to be missed."
- Maria Mazziotti Gillan "Fusco's love for subjects, past and present, darts in and out, slippery as the fish he drops lines to catch. Never peripheral to human experience, Fusco's poems are centered in the heart." - Vivian Shipley Order this book from Amazon $15 Click Here |
Jessie's Garden"Tony Fusco is a magician-poet who steps onto the stage of his book and pours out a cornucopia of richly-lived experience as diverse as it is abundant. Here are saints that step down from their framed pictures, a father transported by the player piano he learns “by ear” in an old barn, Victory gardens, witches, street musicians, a ragman who terrifies a child, and men and women who are as passionate and tragic as figures in classical opera. Most vivid to this reader are the Italian men-men with names like Jake, Julio, and Jack –their games, passions, music, virtues and vices, brought memorably to life. In Jessie’s Garden we encounter a poet as enraptured by the tale as he is by graceful turns of phrase and runs of sentence –music."
– Gray Jacobik Order this book from Amazon only $6.99 click here |
Journals - Caduceus, the Poets at Artplace - Annual Poetry -
Caduceus is no longer accepting submissions
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Chapbooks
Songs Like Tears, From the Fortress, and Homemade Macaroni
Sample Poems
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More Poems CLICK HERE Snakes and the Rumor of Snakes There is a twenty foot queen snake in the lot next door, don’t go in there. There are boards with rusty nails you might step on in the tall grass just over the fence. Forget that your cousin has thrown so many of your toys there. Watch out for the old well somewhere near abouts, only a thin sheet of plywood was put on top of it, and that was a long time ago. Even a thin little boy like yourself would fall right through and no one could hear you call for help, if you did. Don’t squeeze the trumpet shaped flowers, there may be a bee inside, and stay away from the junk pile behind the new houses, in between the sheet rock yellow jackets build their nests. Don’t jump up and down on your mattress, you could hit your head on the ceiling or worse, bounce out the window cutting major arteries on the glass. Wait at least thirty minutes after eating before you go in the water. Keep out of old lady Abernathy’s yard and her pear trees, she has children tied in her basement and a house full of canning jars. Don’t walk across a grave, you’ll cause someone in your family to die within a year. Play with a cane and you’ll break a leg, sit in a wheelchair, you’ll get polio. Don’t swim in the lagoon, no matter how hot a day, weeds will wrap around your ankles, pull you under. It’s only for your own good to stay away. Your well being is truly our only concern. Relax, now that we have told you these things, there is no reason to worry. Kaye’s Art Supply “I am leading a quiet life at Mike’s place everyday..” Autobiography Lawrence Ferlinghetti Yes, I am leading the wild life now working at Kaye’s, selling the dry goods of Art to people who wander in off the street, blue-lipped and shaved head people, who are navel pierced, and nose pierced, pierced in places you cannot help but stare at, pierced in the soul sometimes. They pass through on parade with the Raggedy Man and the Tattooed Woman each with a story like Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, buying India Ink on coffee breaks from their various houses of detention. Yes I am leading a wild life now at Kaye’s Art Supply, where Yale students purchase one piece of paper and one pencil a day with their scholarship money, and Law students are learning to make lampshades from opaque paper of just the correct weight and thickness, where medical types seek markers that will write on bone and not run at the first sight of blood, and florescent spray that sticks to the coats of lab animals; Where future journalists and Playboy protesters run naked in bodypaint, the kind that prints well on the front pages of newspapers back home, where Archetype Architects craft imaginary Music Halls from chipboard and razor blades, totting it all around in identical back packs to keep their burdens lite. Yes, I have been meeting some “Name” people here at Kaye’s and it is liberating my psyche, some real artists, some painters some theatrical understudies, encountering at the counter, writers and booksellers, Politicians and Panhandlers, Checking them out. Watching them closely in case any creativity might be left behind, or any fame hanging out of their pockets unpaid for, studying their faces to see if the fire from heaven has scinged their eyebrows or blackened a soul or two back to its primitive instincts. Yes, it is a relatively wild life now here at Kaye’s compared to trafficking in televisions at Sears and Roebuck, or pushing paper plates and bags to fund-raisers from Fairfield County, Here the Horseman passes by seven times a day, tagging cars, and Renoir’s cafe folk and Goya’s Bench-warmers work the sidewalks pastel colored, drawing on experience for inspiration. Here the Venus of Umbrio and Olympia pause in transparent sundresses and halter tops,push strollers in high heels, and contemplate dabbling in watercolors or finger paint. Yes, I am brushing with titillation hourly and helping to form tomorrows with clay that doesn’t harden and making dramatic masks from pre-packaged forms and paper mache... and how I would like to awaken the Dreaming God from his slumber under the world, to rise with him, to join the Wild Hunt, ride the fade-less images of woodcuts throughout eternity... It could be such a wild life here at Kaye’s except those times, most of the time when the radio is settled someplace between country music and classical, when the streets are as wet and as empty as all the other blind alleyways, those times when it rains Songs Like Tears and occasionally a poet happens by and sees my book and there is a stolen minute or two talking verse, and taking lyric license that germinates into euphoric times, bursting and pregnant, delivering after nine months or so of hard labor a poem, or some worthy wildness that spews out onto the backs of brown paper bags or cardboard scraps, destined to be immortalized in soft cover, and like all good ideas, eventually, recycled. Exile On early nights and weekends dad plinked at yellowed ivory keys for the edification of poultry in the chicken yard. He taught himself to play by ear, on the piano in the barn, the keys familiar like the accordion’s now wrapped tight and ignored in its case in the closet, one squeeze too many. Sometimes he sang along, a couple of bottles of Schaffer beer on the top of the former upright roller piano. Singing on a hot day under a flat roof, thirsty work. A former roller, he piano was once his mother’s,sat in her parlor, before his brothers helped him carry it when she moved and no one else wanted it. The roller spokes broken, most of the paper rollers sold or ripped, the family once sat around it together, sang on Saturday nights when their mom was sewing take home jobs from work. His father joined in also, sometimes, if he wasn’t home too late. That was before the war and he and his three brothers joined the Navy, before they had come home and married, one by one, his sisters as well, before they started to have children, began to drift apart. Dad married and moved in with in-laws. He did not drive but took the bus to visit his mother’s house on Liberty Street, a weekend odyssey downtown, to walk the bumpy steel railing across the bridge, above the tracks and trains below, to a house full of cousins, and aunts and uncles I did not know. I sat at the piano there, beneath that beautiful mirror, an etched glass image of Artemis the huntress, nude, with full round breasts, her bent bow a crescent moon, its arrows in the struck fallen deer at her feet. I watched as the strong men put the piano in Jake’s truck and carried it first into our house and then into the barn where the sound from it wouldn’t bother anybody, especially his mother-in-law. At first I sat and listened, fetched beers as he played. Listened until he ran out of songs. In a few months the piano collected dust, the chickens peaceful again, the accordion safe in the closet. I thought he had given up, until he began to draw, to paint, and he moved his hobby to the attic, even more remote and excelled in art as he hummed his favorite melodies out loud covering over canvas scenes with brushes strokes like a bandleader. The Last Day of School Savin Rock Amusement Park, West Haven, CT 1850-1965 Penny rolls clenched in our hands we carefully balance stepping down the large steps of the bus, without holding on. Smells intrude, popcorn, french fries, hotdogs and that underlyinghint of something else, seaweed cooking in its stew of salt water, overdone yesterday-- a scent like nowhere else in the world. Our coins scrounged and saved throughout the long winter --stored in piggy banks and empty Zarex glass juice jars shaped like Abe Lincoln, with a slot in his top hat. In the distance we hear three clangs in rapid succession, the carousel house sharing space with the penny arcade where nothing costs a penny anymore, our destination. My father leads, but we have memorized the way and do not venture ahead into the crowd with all the people in the street dazed in the heat of the place as if staggering. It is so unusual to not dodge cars or trucks; it is a street for people The pavement is sticky underfoot scavenger gulls fish through feet and litter for a morsel, battling among themselves for a clam strip or a dropped crinkle cut fry. My sister and I stay close sifting into the place, through the press of people less each year. We navigate between hips and legs, around hand-holders and cotton candy obstacles, anxious stopping at a booth, a game of chance so rare for dad, shooting the cracking twenty-two caliber miniature bullets at clay pipes and ducks. I take a shot, happier to pocket the small brass casing, a prize without having to pay for it. This is not the routine, the circuit we have come to know by rote of traversing the park in a given order: First the flying horses, the bumper cars, the skeeball, finally crossing the street to avoid the scary Laff in the Dark to arrive at the kiddy rides and if weather threatened, the fun house, Peter Frank’s, with the moving steps, the rolling barrel and the great slide, where packaged into a burlap sack kids slid the slick metal drop in seconds to crash into the padded wall at the bottom. I was too afraid of height and burns to ride, each year managing another couple of more dizzy steps closer to the top bag in hand to the urging of my father and sister. Maybe next time, next season. We did not waste money on food with dinner waiting at home, maybe one snack or treat before the end, a dip-topped soft ice cream cone or a box of popcorn, one half to eat and one half for the pigeons on the green while waiting for our transfer between buses. Our day usually ending with a few cents in our pockets and almost enough skeeball tickets for a prize, if we didn’t lose them by next year, and we remembered to bring them next year and if we didn’t read the signs that were posted everywhere and on the rickety roller coaster and Mill Chute or know what the word redevelopment meant or condemned or even that there might not be a Rock to return to next year or any year, ever again. |
Sample Poems from Extinction
Before Coffee I might have missed the end of the world last night which would go a long way to explain why everything outside my house is gone. It could be the reason the leaves are off all the trees, the pine needles as well, the evergreens green no more. Maybe it is still a dark foggy night, or perhaps the sun no longer shines, we just don’t know yet. Maybe there is no moon because there is no moon. Shouldn’t I have felt a wobble or severe shaking at its fleeing, its sneaking off into space, the dimensions folding inside within themselves, the stars popping out of their constellations, the skies now shapeless. I should have expected a black hole or inverted sphere sucking in all the cars, the telephone poles, the beach blankets, CNN News, the gangsters on the corner, everything. Could I have slept through the screams and all the other sounds of ripping and crashing, politicians sucking wind, wind howling classical and country music, Miley Cyrus on her wrecking ball hitting the bricks on the way out of the Galaxy? All my lost keys and books and socks, the high school yearbook, the Christmas card list whooshed away in a blink. Just stuff is what it is, or was. All I miss and wish I had in my mug right now is sugar and cream or some chariot swinging sweet and low. Flight Path Save me a seat in the car in your garage. I’m on my way. I’m coming like Judgment Day, I’m coming like the last asteroid, I’m coming like the end of time’s little black pill, I’m coming like ISIS riding a Toyota into drone central. I’ll be there like the 2nd amendment. I’ll be there like inheritance taxes, I’ll be there like probate court, like Title Nineteen. I’ll be there like stockbrokers on a Monday, like the White House Press, like the Supreme court press. I will elect to depart from the election trail. Save me some space in the deepest of coal mines, the failing coral reef, the sink holes, the hollow mountains. Save me the edge on the melting ice floe, the shrinking poles, the polar bear dining club. I’ll be back at the reservation before closing time. I’ll be gone before last call at Mory’s. There’s no need to wait for me, but it would be nice. I’ll be coming the way of all flesh, coming on a day in ordinary time, coming before the black bird sings. I’ll be coming before the bird flu, the swine flu, the mosquito pandemic. I’m in the race to end the race. I won’t get caught in the human trafficking. I’m paying attention to the stop signs, the off ramp, the no-you return signs, the internal combustion engine, frontal lobe dementia, brain plaques and tangles, MS and degenerative cancer. I’ll be limping my way through Pharmacology and the twelve steps of self-abuse. I am long on living and short on housing, short on time, short of compassion. I am done with the travelogue, done with desire. I can’t wait till next season. I won’t need a stone, my last marker was called in. I’ll deal with the cold, I’ll deal with the devil if he has the balls to show up. I’m coming with you, or alone. You need not leave the door open. I’ll be coming rest assured, and assuredly most of all not along for the ride. |