Big Bad Asterisk* by Carlo Matos

Big Bad Asterisk* is a sequence of prose poems that entangles the reader in a narrative of human oddity and originality. Welcome to the family where the father uses a machete on the hedges, the great uncle is lost hunting trolls, the only way to talk to the grandfather is through the grandmother and the baby’s spoon is a bone. Beware! Once you start reading it is impossible not to find yourself tangled in this family.

—Susan Yount, author of Catastrophe Theory

I’m no longer surprised that Carlo Matos spends his free time fighting in cages because his new book of poetry, Big Bad Asterisk* has knocked the wind out of me. Like a kick in the gut, the story, the prose, the way he tells it – a way I’ve never encountered before – hits you hard and the welts stay with you long after you’ve finished. “Nestled among the junk, the porno solicitations, and penis-increasing tonics and creams was a two-week old message … ‘Are you married, yet? If not, come find me.’” And so begins the quest, one that allows us a moment with this uneasy but captivating hero. I can honestly say I’ll never look at an asterisk the same way again.

—Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire

Matos’s asterisked world contains donkeys, size nine-and-a-half women’s shoes, licentious goats, and the reverberating echoes of Nautilus-shell genomes. There are cage fighters, ex-boyfriends with giant penises, and a Yeti-loving heroine . . . it is a dialogic juggernaut of multiple intelligences, an asterisk map of a young boy’s monkey pajamas, leading home.

—Michael Colson, Portuguese American Journal

Rip roaring! A brilliant book of aphoristic short poems that capture the unsaid, the footnotes of our thoughts, the sub-text of our days, the everyday secrets of what is revealed by the ever present after-thought, of “the other,” the hidden, the darkest dilemma of what and what not to reveal, to admit to, to wonder about, to spill over into real life, the ironic true voice of that big bad asterisk!

—Millicent Borges Accardi, author of Injuring Eternity

Carlo Matos is an Azorean-American poet and fiction writer. He has published in various journals and anthologies like Atticus Review, Short, Fast, and Deadly, Paper Darts, BlazeVOX, Arsenic Lobster, 5×5, Ragazine, kill author, DIAGRAM, The Mad Hatters’ Review, narrative (dis)continuities and the Gavea Book of Portuguese-American Poetry, among others. He is the author of A School for Fishermen (BrickHouse Books), Counting Sheep Till Doomsday (BlazeVOX Books) and Ibsen’s Foreign Contagion (Academica Press). He currently lives in Chicago, IL where he teaches English at the City Colleges of Chicago by day and is a cage fighter by night. After hours he can be found at Chicago’s Poetry Bordello entertaining clients.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 120 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-119-1

$16

Pre-Orders Welcome

Big Bad Asterisk* by BlazeVOX [books]