BLUE WINS FOREVER by Paco Brown

Mama, the barometric pressure is rising,
the wind turning trees colors past analyzing.

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"Paco Brown is a very metaphysical poet in a not so metaphysical world which to me is a great yearning contrast in his writing that always delivers."
(THOMAS FUCALORO / author, Inheriting Craziness Is Like A Soft Halo Of Light)

The world can be a cruel fucking place. This particular precinct of it, New York City, seems to get crueler and crueler every day—as well as less and less hospitable, at least to those who choose, or are forced, to scramble for sustenance at its so-called margins. Many of us quote-unquote-poets have grown quite attached to that status-less-ness. Many of us, in fact, came to Manhattan as deliberate pariahs. Far be it from me to underestimate the private miseries of any man or woman, rich or poor, homeless or more palatially appointed—. And yet I think it safe to say that most of us are far more insulated from the world’s cruelty than we are likely to admit given those long-suffering poetic personas that creep into our work. It seems only logical that the closer one gets to it, the angrier one’s letters from the edge of the precipice should become.

Not so fast—.

With his cry of BLUE WINS FOREVER, Paco Brown lends a much needed buoyancy to Rilke’s somewhat sober pronouncement that poetry should, above all else, be an act of praise! There is no snarling or barking in this book, there is little anger, and certainly no whining. (And believe me, there could be!) Nor is there a trace of that down-low glamour content to fetishize social surfaces, rather than to transcend them. On the contrary, these are poems of celebration—instinctively ecstatic even when staring the awful truth in the face.

And just as the cold gray facts cannot content this poet’s eye, neither can the formal lines on the page quite contain this poet’s voice. His music is not one of formal rupture; nor does it ever plead tedious formal ignorance. When forms break down here, they do so naturally. They do not fracture, so much as flow—or rather, they overflow. So that in the end both form and content confront the reader with an irresistible emotional coherence.

This much-anticipated chapbook was conceived of years ago, though for a long dark time it seemed as if such a plan could never be realized. Many of the poems it contains were thought to be lost entirely—some of you might remember first hearing these pieces of Manhattan’s open-mike history on Monday nights at the Nightingale Lounge’s Saturn Series, nestled between the measured verse of Ray Pospisil and the toots and blasts of a still callow whippersnapper named Fucaloro. It is a testament to the ultimate triumph in its title, BLUE WINS FOREVER, that this book came to fruition at all, given the numerous obstacles it had to surmount and absorb. But here it is!

"...the gray sky clears, fades
away like a scar and
he sees in the black sky
a single winter star."

I trust it will prove as enduring as its own guiding starlight—."
(R. NEMO HILL / author, Magellan's Reveries)

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Staple Bound Chapbook
24 pages