The Long Way Home reviewed in Pedestal Magazine

Leonard Gontarek’s The Long Way Home, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner

Leonard Gontarek
The Long Way Home
BlazeVOX [books]

Reviewer: Vivian Wagner

Leonard Gontarek’s The Long Way Home is, in fact, a long poetry collection—over 400 pages!—with a sweeping, sublime style to match its length. Perhaps that length is necessary to do what the collection seems to want and need to do: make sense of contemporary American culture, with all of its contradictory and antagonistic elements, its uncertainty about the future, and its will to survive.

The poems in this collection are haunted by early twenty-first century American politics and culture. To be clear, only a few of the poems are explicitly political, but those pieces function much like signposts, indicating themes and anxieties that underlie the entire book.

The collection’s title calls attention to the long and winding structure of the book itself. It opens with a section called “American Landscape,” made up of poems that mostly have one-word titles: “Perfume,” “Chopin,” “Coffee.” This section is meandering and random, an exploration of landscapes both urban and rural, modern and historical. The collection finishes with a much shorter section called “Samurai Ghost Looking For His Head In A Cemetery,” which serves as a kind of coda. [read the whole review here]

Buy your copy of Leonard Gontarek’s The Long Way Home here.