Nick Papaxanthos
ISBN 978-1-77126-093-0
$17.00 CDN/USA
96 pages
Award-winning poet Nick Papaxanthos’s first collection is a rollicking, fast-frame, strobe-light-illuminated tour through the surrealism of the ordinary. These poems, composed while getting a haircut or investigating the contents of a sandwich, peer through the windows of the mundane into a world of fractured wonder. The reader will find encounters with a rebellious spoon, a terrible bucket, a talking blanket and disillusioned farm animals. Each line in these poems is cannily alert to the endless and strange possibilities of language. Love me Tender has been braised to perfection to ensure tenderness.
“Leaping, clever poetry lives in here. You’ll laugh and maybe even cry! Then you’ll shout his name through a doughnut: Nick Papaxanthos has arrived.” —Carolyn Smart
“There is a quiet, meditative quality to Nick’s poetry fed by a stream of strange, disjunctive imagery. The spotlight shines on words that will soon lose their perceived identities and recombine forces with chittering delight, at times whipped up into a synapse-misfiring frenzy to play whack-a-mole on your brain. Just when you thought it was safe to pop your head up, it ain’t.” —Mark Laba
“Love Me Tender is the most explicitly surreal book of poems I have read in some time. Papaxanthos has populated the book with the switched hats of meaning and description. There are many exciting lateral moves in perception, making for an entertaining and engrossing read, and real humdingers of poems.” —Alice Burdick
