MORNING IN AMERICA
A Poetic Assemblage from the Long Decade

Igenus Press/Eccsbooks,

Morning in America is a unique poetic work posing a challenging question:  What if the past is not, as Aristotle said, "that which has been," but that which has been lifted from the crypt to serve the purposes of the future-blind?  That the past lives on is not news.  That it should be reanimated and subsidized to keep Wall St. in the money is a different kettle of fish, one that drives an eco-conscious political poet like Laska to satire, irony and splenetic invective.  His mix of anti-lyric and dialogue assemblage fills a gap in contemporary verse culture.  As the celebrated poet-critic Donald Hall observed, "Curse and invective are strangely missing from American poetry...we lack public denunciation."  Morning in America reviles the depredations of the unregulated "free” market, which the poet condemns as an "infernal machine" tethered to a chthonic political religion, an old world solecism masquerading as a "new world order."   The book as a whole forms an idol-wrecking constellation of counter-truths that expand the range of resistance and return poetry to its avant garde critical function.