Robert S. Pesich
Model Organism
Five Oaks Press, 2017
"An altar of monitors" describes Robert Pesich's curiousness and embracing perspicacity. His insights are both scientific and heartbreaking; poems that know "the blues" also illuminate the world with a light of many colors. When there is an I, it's a poet-scientist able to identify even physiologically with the prey of a red-tailed hawk or a hummingbird loose in the Biology building. Pesich is our Miroslav Holub; his Nude Mouse is Elizabeth Bishop's armadillo. This collection advances our conciousness and smartens up Twenty-first Century poetry's aesthetic."
--Sandra McPherson
"How many sights and sounds our routine-framed lives keep us from experiencing. Not until something unusual strikes, something that disrupts these routines, are we apt to pay attention to all we're suddenly or about to be without. Of course, with time and the help of new routines, we seem to forget even this. Robert Pesich's Model Organism is a reminder to us of what it means to know things not only from their origins, their molecular dispositions, their coveted seeds, sprouts, water and earth but personally as well. He engages the evolution of things and by so doing, translates it for us through a language textured with particulars. It's the way his work's always addressed life's hidden realities, which is why it's no wonder this collection continues along that same path of preserving what's become unseen in the seen for any future willing to pay attention and open its own eyes up wide.
--Paul B. Roth, editor & publisher, The Bitter Oleander Press
$13.00
Burned Kilim
Dragonfly Press, 2001
"...a collection rich in particulars, filled with both displacement and a sense of place and self that transcends borders and boundaries. So Pesich speaks of 'the hive in my own chest' and a 'shrapnel of crumbs', of foods through which one tastes the flavors of other lives. "When I listen to the silence / I begin to remember my address.' Out of that silence, Pesich has carefully and beautifully crafted these heartfelt poems."
--Kim Addonizio
"...Tension between language and experience is transcended by Pesich's ability to look back through this life at significant steps taken to reach it which, at the time, seemed haphazard and mysterious. His work is that looking back without any of the pretentious self-conciousness that pervades most of our post-modern poetry. Reading it from cover to cover releases a freshness to one's spirit that rarely shines through the constant degradation to which every citizen in our society succumbs.
--Paul B. Roth
$12.00
Cuts from the Barbershop
Tollbooth Press, 2004
$12.00
Out of Print