There is nothing like having a talented young poet in your midst to re-ignite a slumbering passion for poetry. "The Mad Song" is a fresh example of a poem that does what I believe poetry should do. It infiltrates the intellect, energizes the emotions and agitates the archetypes. Future critics will spend long hours dissecting the wonderful intricacies of this first masterpiece, but the general reader will absorb the humor and the humanity and be somehow changed forever by glimmerings of ancient and modern wisdom from the poet.

The Mad Song is a prose meditation, bluesy elegy, sensual lament, comic colloquy, poetic memoir, and cri de cour for liberty that seeks not necessarily to reveal the invisible republic, but to remind you that it's there.

From the foreword by former MacArthur Fellow Douglas Crase:

"The grand current of American poetry has never fully accommodated the disabling deficit its readers would sustain when betrayed by their own country. There were outcries, Democratic Vistas and Howl, whose places in the tradition remain unsettled. And yet poetry, no less than political society, needs to recognize the measure of its injury in order to continue as a credible agent of cultural transmission. Schiavo's prosodic achievement, which arrives here with a spontaneous authority that may be harder won than he knows, resizes the necessary wisdom to a lyrical dimension that still doesn't impede the exercise of what can only be called a transcendental citizenship. His refusal to be diminished by the country—the refusal to let the country diminish itself—is ultimately a kind of devotion."

For a preview of The Mad Song, including the foreword and the first chapter, click here to download (616KB).