Surf Music
All of the poems in Surf Music are short, and some are funny. At least one or two were written on an electric typewriter given to the author sometime during his freshman year of high school. It would be nice to say that R.S. Deese was destined to write poems, but if the immediate and visceral pleasures that the typewriter provided, with its hum and the striking sound of its hammers, are subtracted, it becomes hard to imagine how else this would have started.
One thing that kept Deese coming back to poems, long after that typewriter had wandered away, was the feeling that writing a decent poem could be like solving an algebra problem, without the math. One might be able to find the value of a single variable, or at least define the relationship between two variables in the clearest possible terms. Surf Music is part of that equation, and it feels good.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
Deese's well-titled book is the work of an athletic, adaptable mind and an enterprising, distinctive listener.
-Robert Pinsky
Wade into Surf Music. You'll relish every incoming wave-from choppy epigrams that bite and tickle to dazzling breakers that slap and console. Like the surf, Deese's poems roil with life and speak in a mesmerizing voice.
-Robert Wexelblatt, author of Zublinka Among Women and Heiberg's Twitch
In one of his delightful poem Deese says, not meaning a word of it, that he was born a lemur among the tribe of birds. Nothing lemur like here in this liveliness. The book is a cascade of observation and pleasure in the witnessing, and offering us the pleasure in these adept short-line free verse poems.
-David Ferry
