Earth-Shattering News and Other Catastrophes Considered While Listening to the Genius of Love

Poems

José Padua’s wonderful poetry conjures up a unique world where the ridiculous and profound are confused for one another. He fuses Frank O’Hara’s acerbic charm, Bukowski’s grumpy cynicism, Whitman’s long breath, Iggy Pop’s agitpop, and Roland Barthes’s poetic semiotics to evoke a voice that glides between the ecstatic mundane and catastrophic global, righteous concern and between detached bemusement, indignation, and wonderment. Highly recommended for the unwillingly disaffected—and everyone else as well.

bart plantenga, author of Beer Mystic

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This is a book with a soundtrack/playlist. The poems use a range of popular songs and music as a starting point for lyrical daydreams, serious narratives, personal and political reflections, as well as pop culture mash-ups that may seem random but in the end merge to create a performance-on-page that is fundamentally punk in aim and attitude.
Although musical themes and backgrounds are often involved, music works more as both creative constraint and catalyst than as thematic guide here. Above all, music feeds Padua’s poetic practice, which is free-ranging, covering topics from small town to big city, youthful exhuberance to middle-age restraint, tranquils idylls to political violence. His neurodivergent mind (comprising Tourette’s syndrome, ADHD, OCD, and perhaps a few other conditions he does not understand) plays a big role in generating poems that are always as engaging as they are insightful and informed.

More Praise

José Padua’s funny, passionate narratives about life, love, and justice in a world that can seem like a ‘silly horror film’ combine streetwise candor with fierce aesthetic ability. ‘I’m not good at forgetting / much less forgiving,’ the poet tells us, and those two qualities inhabit the unexpurgated outbursts of the heart that give this book its riveting energy and power.

Terence Winch, author of That Ship Has Sailed

128 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

March, 2027

isbn : 9780822968757

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

Jose Padua’s manuscript, A Short History of Monsters, was chosen by Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Arkansas Press. He identifies as Filipino-American neurodivergent. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Bomb, Salon, Air/Light, Exquisite Corpse, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Northwest Review, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and many other journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2025. He’s written features and reviews for NYPress, Washington City Paper, the Brooklyn Rail, and the New York Times and read his work at the Lollapalooza Festival, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Living Theater, the Split This Rock poetry festival, the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, the Washington Project for the Arts, and many other venues. A stay-at-home dad, he lives in Lancaster, PA with his wife, the poet Heather L. Davis, and their daughter and son.

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