Early Reviews of A Single Hurt Color:

Demcak weaves pop culture references into poems like Trinidad and Duhamel. He has a talent for writing lines that will be remembered long after you place A Single Hurt Color on your shelf. It is a given that Demcak will be remembered; he's a rising star in American poetry.

- Dustin Brookshire, editor Limp Wrist magazine

--Tony Trigilio, author, The Lama’s English Lesson

The title of Andrew Demcak’s new book, A Single Hurt Color, is borrowed from the Gertrude Stein poem “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass” which very much reminds me of the broken snow globe at the beginning of Orson Welles’ classic "Citizen Kane." Like that film, Demcak renders a view of the world through the filter of a shard, exposing the sharper edges, while at other times opening the reader's eye to a new shade. The poet colors pop culture, politics, nature, science, relationships and reflections, with a piercing command of language, while employing a keenly tuned ear to the music of each word.

--J.P. Dancing Bear, editor, The American Poetry Journal

The prolific Andrew Demcak returns in his third poetry collection, a single hurt color, with his pithy and succinct lyrics, full of agile turns and that crisp music we have come to know and appreciate from him.  This time around Demcak organizes his work into three sections that explore our daily grammatical relationships to the world. Indeed, taking a cue from Gertrude Stein with the collection’s title, grammar is the thing that connects us, to the world and to each other.  And so you will find Demcak’s consciousness starting broad, touching, holding, studying the objects and things and people of the third person, then narrowing to the more intimate “you” as a myriad of second persons are addressed, ending with the very immediate and singular first person “I” and the stories that make up that identity.  While the list of objects and persons, living and dead, that people these poems are too numerous to list, each is chosen carefully for you to consider.  You will read and re-read these poems as if it is the first time you’ve encountered the world as the world is refracted back to you through the hue of a “single hurt color,” that lens of a wine-blushed kaleidoscope.

--Matthew Hittinger, author of Narcissus Resists & Pear Slip

Andrew Demcak opens yet more vistas into that seductive world he continues to create in his new book of poems, A Single Hurt Color. And even for the polished practiced linguist he has revealed before, this sturdy volume reaches even higher marks on the rising tide of his young career.  Demcak is a wizard with words, a sorcerer and lusty sensualist who is able to paint indelible images that may fly past the reader’s eye as in his haiku settings, or linger in the musky flavors of physical encounters experienced or imagined.  He whisks us away on journeys to other times, other places, dabbles with thoughts of Kurt Cobain, Wallace Stevens and Freud, channels Icarus, Samson and Delilah, and Joseph Smith, tinkers with lovesongs to mussels and orchids, and summons some of the most erotic scenes imaginable.  Demcak at once entertains, challenges, seduces, and puzzles us with some of the finest new work being birthed today – a poet shaman!

--Grady Harp

Demcak loads his poems with nouns, the hard actualities of existence, whether literary (Wallace Stevens, Poe), pop cultural (iPhones, Kurt Cobain), or the wider world of meteorite ALH841, New Zealand mussels with their "catholic gills," and Margaret Thatcher. And just as the world presents itself without explanatory guide, so too do many of these poems: "A Single Hurt Color" with its clear images of devastation and estrangement (but whose?), or the sharp objective correlatives of "Go Now Before It Starts Snowing." Others, like "Snapshot" and its cruel fiancé/husband, cleanly and painfully delineate their intent. I do not always know exactly what Demcak is "saying," but one cannot fail to recognize the “meaning” of his poetry in this collection, of family, death and sensuality.

--Cooper Renner, editor elimae magazine

With or without a glossy finish, “dry & flightless,” (from the last poem “Relapse”) Demcak’s pages turn & tilt with ingredients only he could compose. If you're a passenger, riding with Demcak is a most interesting adventure. In A Single Hurt Color, capturing the moment is a success: interiors blend with exteriors, histories become part of the present & doubts turn into beliefs. With a word choice that will caulk any of the reader's missing spots, A Single Hurt Color is bound to shine solidly. 
 
--- J. Michael Wahlgren, editor of Gold Wake Press

Pink Narcissus (GOSS 183/MiPOesias, 2009)

by Andrew Demcak

Reviewed by Grady Harp

Mutual Admiration: Both Sides of the Water Mirror 

Andrew Demcak has the ability to enter forbidden rooms of dark thoughts with his uncensored erotic poetry, allowing the reader to nurture fantasy and physicality like few other poets. In response to the artist to whom this book is dedicated - Matthew Hittinger whose newly published NARCISSUS RESISTS is already drawing accolades from those who know his work as well as those discovering him - Demcak's five poem chapbook PINK NARCISSUS is a remarkably mature theme on a variation. 

While Hittinger's Narcissus is in many ways a time travel exploration of the mythical Narcissus, placing him squarely in the challenges of a contemporary milieu, Demcak's PINK NARCISSUS (in part a dual response to Hittinger's poetic realization and the 1971 movie by the same name that according to Demcak may have been the first American Gay film) focuses on the sexual musings of this quixotic character. In these brief pages Demcak's Narcissus flickers in odd films that conjure sexual fantasies, as in #3: 

'For example: he pictures one day being tried, exposed before a Roman 
emperor. 
That wish-water postmark of a slave-boy. 
Condemned by the fine bend of his cock. 

Later, in a male harem, the next scene, his beaded phallus performs. 

Heaven on location, otherworldly lighting. 
Scrims settle over a public urinal. 
His pubic hairs are plucked, guttural, in boredom. 

Upright fingers in marble bas-relief, mortal mirrors.' 

Demcak has approached Hittinger's superb work much the way music composers pay homage to colleagues, e.g. Brahms' 'Variations on a Theme by Haydn', Rachmaninov's 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini', among others. In doing so he enriches our experience with Hittinger's work while continuing to prove his own important standing as a poet unafraid to explore shrouded psyches. An excellent accomplishment and an exciting poetic response to a current colleague! And it is stunningly set off by the art of Didi Menendez who also published this fine work. 

-Grady Harp 

From Frederick at Goodreads:

"About five years ago, I saw the movie upon which this poem is based. It was filmed over a period of years during the 1960's and focuses on dreamlike incarnations of a graceful young man.  Having seen PINK NARCISSUS at Huntington's own Cinema Arts Centre, I can say the poem is a marvelous extension of the film.  Andrew Demcak's poem evokes the spirit of this film. Art begets art here. A Goodreads author, Matthew Hittinger, is the subject of the painting on the cover of the book. He has written a book called NARCISSUS RESISTS.  Demcak and Hittinger are communicating with each other about the film PINK NARCISSUS and Goodreads has allowed us to observe this communication.  I urge you to read the e-chapbook." 

ZERO SUMMER (BlazeVOX [books], 2009)
Poems by Andrew Demcak 

Reviewed by Grady Harp

"And a Stimulus from TS Eliot "

Andrew Demcak continues to blossom as an important poet with his newest collection of pieces of imagination married to craftsmanship. ZERO SUMMER is apparently inspired or derived from the thoughts by TS Eliot’s Phrases from ‘Little Gidding’, one of the portions of his FOUR QUARTETS. Demcak divides this body of work into three sections, each reflecting a phrase from the quoted Eliot about those fractured moments in time trapped by circumstances, negating completion. 

Part 1 ‘Between melting and freezing’ contains some of the finest erotic poetry. In what is becoming a hallmark for this poet, these poems define lust, desire, onanism, finding and feeling and losing love affairs, childhood longings and memories - the sum of a sensual being. His range is from the lyrical (‘Vincent V. in 1993’) to the raw. In ‘Venus in Furs’ Demcak defines eroticism: 

….in 
the morning I bag his lunch 
while we fuck 
my spine flat on the ironing board 

at 
night 
inside the moon’s Valium 
he’ll feed 
lipstick into my incubator 
so my asshole 
will match Italian shoes.’ 

Part 2 ‘…this is the springtime But not in time’s covenant’ offers Demcak the opportunity to share the struggles of writing poetry as in ‘Automated Response to Mark Strand’ :’…the poem is a permission/given away’, or in the stunning ‘Myself in Memoirs’: 

‘I’m this close 
knee to chest 
perceptible 
visited by angry philosophers 

such news embarrasses me 
when training 
lions 

or 
American lap dogs 

or 
those boys awed by the rancor of 
slept-in beds 

however true to my journal: 

Eros 
Then a few sticky peach peelings 
and moonlight 
on a dreamed-of ceiling. 

In Part 3 ‘…a bloom more sudden Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,…’ Demcak delves into current events - tragedies, disease, social injustices, world events that seem planets away until he stirs them into spells for the reader. And he closes the collection with a moment of breathtaking beauty in ‘Moment of the Yew Tree, Moment of the Rose’:

‘wisteria spent itself completely 
your twin garlands 
over the juice pitchers 
the block party pissing its light 
into the grass 

young peonies 
dandelions 
frowning white 
the summer night 
behind ears 

no mistaking the tulips 
who wanted to kiss you 
waiting beneath cautious stars 

somewhere 
a lover folded like laughter 
in dogwood blossom 
moonlight 
mint and dirt 

your heart 
as sure-footed as rainwater’ 

Imagery such as this and the countless other examples begging to be quoted from these fifty seven poems create such rich atmospheres of beauty and urgency, and thoughts without horizon, that them seem to be coming from countless fertile minds instead of just one – influenced though that mind may be by TS Eliot! Andrew Demcak has the gift and we are all richer for it. 

-Grady Harp 

From Randall Mann (author of Breakfast with Thom Gunn & Complaint in the Garden):

"ZERO SUMMER's skinny, sticky, cock-swaggering poems take 'bloody comfort' in Andrew Demcak's lubricated, literary longing, the bourbon 'sweet / with unimagined grief,' the very words 'laboring / over / the soup-bones of literature.'  This is a book that will get under your fingernails."

—Randall Mann

From Nina Lindsay (author of Today's Special Dish):

“Spiralling electrically around a theme of longing, Demcak's newest work moves outward in arcs—from the sensual self, in erotic and familial relationship with the other ("my skin listening // still no accompanist: I can't kiss me!" )—to the writing and artistic self,  the creative pursuit of spirit through form (God "an unflawed blackberry…rosettes of icing…the murdered and the living brightness")—to this spirit in the world and in other people ("O divine architect! / O quick-drying cement!"). His language is playful, charged, articulate and highly crafted—always with an introspective sense of humor and form. Full of music from Ellington to Schoenberg, full of heroes from Noah to Ginsberg, Demcak's poems are attuned to both absurdity and pathos, those extremes that lead the poet and the reader towards their "unimaginable" Zero Summer.”

—Nina Lindsay

From Kaya Oakes on Goodreads:

"I'm biased, because I've believed the author's a genius since 1995. Hopefully the rest of the world will catch up with me soon."

From Sarah on Goodreads:

"The language is excellent, luscious even."

Review of Catching Tigers in Red Weather & Zero Summer by Piet Bach 

Andrew Demcak is a polished professional. Though his poems have appeared in many very fine journals, this appears to be his first published collection where the stage is his and his alone. His style is unique: each of the 66 poems is written in six stanzas of couplets and each poem lives on an individual page, and from this 'confinement' that would restrict other writers in scope of content and conveying a mood or atmosphere or short story, Demcak creates his magic. 

The range of emotions and images and topics and observations he touches is so vast that Demcak is able to address any reader of poetry and enhance previous flights of thought with completely new visions. Equally at home in describing nature and people and memories of poets passed, he draws upon what seems like an endless vocabulary which he uses in ways that causes our infatuation with words to blossom with fresh meaning. An example: 

'SLEEP IN THE MOJAVE DESERT 
We doze and swelter in a comfortless 
desert. Stars ignite the lengthy evening. 

Crickets congregate in their armor-plate. 
Grains of sand retain the day's heat. We lie 

queerly here, objects of obsidian. 
The rabbit's sad cry from owl talon. 

The sky splits at sunup to dearer air, 
cool dew gliding from the blue horizon, 

the straight distance without road or address. 
Noonday earthstones connecting dry lines, 

guarding their pallid salts, where lizards creep 
like firecats emerged from cinders.' 

Extracting one poem from this bounty contained in CATCHING TIGERS IN RED WEATHER is almost cruel, so completely fresh is every poem and profound. Demcak is able to cross gender lines as well as any poet today as his LAST LOVE proves: 

'So everything came into place, He tore 
the gauze to the core of my boyhood, 

sliding in while my eyelids turned plum. 
His bitter mouth, the insistent red veil 

of the Gaza sun, my thighs like twin doors 
held open. I had chosen the closest 

man, cut my bandages like a runner 
testing his legs. I unfolded myself 

a loose-petalled Narcissus, Anxious 
for his erection, condomless, straining, 

unaware that his body politic 
was followed by the viral campaign.' 

Andrew Demcak is an important new voice, a man who will surely change literature and the way we enter the unexplainable places that poetry finds and describes. This is a rich book of brilliant jewels. Highly recommended!

-Grady Harp 

From Matthew Hittinger (author of Pear Slip & Narcissus Resists):

"I enjoyed Catching Tigers in Red Weather very much! Love the 12 line form--creates a nice compression and tension to the imagery and pace. And there's some lovely music in there--I like how the rhyme is often embedded, the final word of a couplet rhyming not with the final word of its companion first line, but with the second- or third-to-last word of the previous line. Good stuff."

-Matthew Hittinger

This brief but pungent collection of five poems may be an isolated work reflecting the thoughts experienced in 672 hours (or 28 days) the standard course of drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Or it may be an excerpt from a yet to be released larger collection of poems by American poet Andrew Demcak. And again, it may be reportage from the author’s personal experience or simply another crown in the intuitive mind of one of our most interesting poets writing today. But here it is, 672 HOURS, as a chapbook and to attempt to ignore the power and depth of involvement in these poems is impossible.

Demcak’s alchemy with words is present in everything he writes and he seems at his best when writing about topics or situations or submerged feelings/prior pains few other poets dare touch. And Demcak has the courage to make these danger zones like personal revelations. Reading the five works here creates the sense of beginning with the psychotic delusions or mind alterations of the admitted patient still imaging strange visual input stimulated by toxins and ending with a suggestion of incipient recovery. In the first poem there are descriptions of ordinary things turned extraordinary and yet he ends that poem with the insight ‘I have no time, nor acquaintance with health.’

In the second poem our observer shares his perception of his cellmate, blurred with the realities of detoxification. By the third poem we are beginning to see his pre-morbid state that began his descent into rehab.

‘He threw me out like wine glasses flying.
Now, my sad jacket hangs there on a hook,
a fine silver corkscrew in its pocket.
We drank waist-deep, handed our fat livers,
the coronation of local drunkards
with daily liquors…..’

And in poem IV memory begins to focus: 

‘A blazing kiss, my lover who put me here.
My tidy partner
Who revisits his checkbook,….’

Until in the last poem the harsh reality of our patient’s place suggests acceptance and insight:

‘Alcoholics collected, made public,
a display of bottled fetuses.’

Once again Andrew Demcak, with the briefest, almost haiku amount of space, manages to sweep us away to places strange yet familiar. Whether reporting or imagining, these poems are electrifying and offer further proof that Andrew Demcak is an artist of importance.

-Review by Grady Harp

WINNER:  GOODREADS POETRY CONTEST

Comments about the poem "Handhold (for a Zygote)" -

"Handhold (for a Zygote)" : astonishing, intelligent, generous poem. 

From Sandra at Goodreads:

"Andrew your poem really was the best. image, music, idea--well done."