Dead Letters by Alan May

The voice in these poems is powerfully deep and inside, as if it’s coming up from the bottom of a well. Yet it is also a recognizable voice, one we have in our own heads at certain moments. Alan May has created an echo-chamber of lyric consciousness, not in service of solipsism, but for the purpose of communion. These poems disturb and sadden and charm, but above all they keep us with them. The illustrations, by Tom Wegrzynowski and May, are as other-worldly as the poems, yet the art of this moving and elegant book convinces the reader the other world is where we do our living. Dead Letters is a work of great beauty and force, of intelligence and stark humility. —Maurice Manning

Only here, in poems playful as they are crucial, whimsical & heartbreaking, where the landscape contains a burning accordion, and each chuffed note/ fan[s] the flame/ that burns/, can the instrument burn to be sung, its every breath a gorgeous annihilation. —Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Melville’s Ahab wanted to “strike though” the pasteboard mask of reality, to whatever was underneath the dead letter of the world. See where that got him. Alan May knows another world, the world such letters make with and out of one another, a visionary, resonant, beautiful world where nothing lurks to lead us away. Dead Letters is a sensuous, lively book, an impressive debut. —Jake Adam York

Part Seuss, part Stein, part Brothers (very) Grimm, Dead Letters arrives in a lively blaze of highly accomplished play marking Alan May’s own arrival into the quirky exactitude of his peculiarly fine poetry. The poems and beautifully right illustrations by Tom Wegrzynowski transport us into a world of ominous fables populated by slightly warped mythic and threatening beings of our own so-called adult world.  Or, as Alan May invites us:  ” Reality/ is the horse/ you rode/ in on;// please dismount/ and hop aboard/ my Rickshaw .”  Please buy this book & take this ride astride a poetry rich in a nightmarish beauty made of music, image, and vision. —Hank Lazer