Mosquito Operas

by Philip Dacey

Philip Dacey's book, brilliantly titled, has the incisive power and resonance of the greatest short poems from the ancient Greek and Oriental poets to moderns like Pound, Crane, Williams, Stevens, Bly, Strand. In lines about his son, Dacey writes "The first time ever bowling:/he does a little dance--/before technique, magic." These poems are that rare combination: technique infused with magic, magic infused with technique. Dacey hones and sharpens language until, again and again, the universe balances on a single line, a single image, often a single word. The ripple effect of the magic is without end.

—James Doyle, author of Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes

Philip Dacey is smart, wise, and funny -- sometimes all at once. These “short poems” come at us quickly, like whispered asides, or mulligan wisdom, and are gone before we know what hit us. Then, like jokes or aphorisms, they hang around in your head. And so, in these snaps and pops, Dacey is a George Carlin, a Ben Franklin, of poetry; his short poems catch you off guard, spin you a bit, and leave you thinking. Mosquito Operas is a delight, and a good reminder that often it is the little things that matter.

—Louis McKee, author of Near Occasions of Sin

The body is said to experience orgasm’s contractions six tenths of a second apart. The brain is a different animal. Analogous sensations in the minds of patrons of Mosquito Operas shall occur following interludes of, say, six seconds—paroxysms not merely memorable, but many unforgettable. Moreover, seduced by the arrangement of those moments and new music in tune with it, here we're talking multiple climaxes.

—Karl Elder, author of The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook

Philip Dacey is the author of ten previous books, including The New York Postcard Sonnets (Rain Mountain press, 2007) and Vertebrae Rosaries (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009) as well as whole collections of poems about Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Eakins. His honors include three Pushcart prizes, two NEA fellowships in creative writing, a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to Stanford, a Discovery award from the New York YM-YWHA’s Poetry Center, and a Fulbright lectureship to Yugoslavia. Individual poems have won prizes from numerous periodicals, including Kansas Quarterly, Yankee, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Nebraska Review, Free Lunch, and The Ledge. With David Jauss, he co-edited Strong Measures (Harper & Row, 1986), an anthology of contemporary American poems in traditional forms.