Simultaneous Revolutions: (Poems)

Simultaneous Revolutions offers a meeting place for individual expression in this plague year where, forced to look within and stay afar, people can do both with these companion poems. With poems about Bob Dylan, contemporary singer Grimes, the Clash, Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries, Allen Ginsberg, and also featuring voices from warehouse rave to the ignored alley, from the blurry highway to a couple’s river-walk to a calm man’s tilling, these poems offer a provocative panorama of our both ancient and neon times.

Headed down the wounded highway
like a nurse on the same road,
don’t know what the banners say today,
but sense the ill from the good.
—from “Soulphone Ringing”

Who hasn’t traveled the revolutions of living? What would that map look like, as varied people chart their own ways to harbor? Find out by checking out Simultaneous Revolutions. From the Lower East Side to the Lehigh River Gorge, from Standing Rock to Chesapeake Bay, from St. Louis to Vermont to San Francisco, Simultaneous Revolutions stands exactly at the broad confluence of a hundred nourishing, wild, wounded rivers—coming together—flowing to a gathering of power, becoming one.

Praise

“I’ve never encountered a book of similar size and comparable invention. Simultaneous Revolutions is a generational event, a work in which two poetic voices join to produce novel rhythmic and visual experiences drawn from contemporary pop music and modern typographical design. Through a variety of beats, a flexible syntax, and references to the Blues, Hip-Hop, Dylan, the Sex Pistols, Grimes and Ginsberg, Colasurdo and Mosson shake hands with Walt Whitman, the original Veg-O-Matic of American poetry and diverse expression. These technical innovations create a socially engaged conversation, one that is intimate with the world.”
—Michael Salcman, editor of Poetry in Medicine (Persea Books) and author of A Prague Spring, Before & After, and Shades & Graces

“In their latest collaborative poetry collection, Simultaneous Revolutions, Marcus Colasurdo and G.H. Mosson establish their forbears: Whitman, Ginsburg, Dylan, the Clash, among others, and write poems that walk the line between contemporary literary work and beat homage. ‘Let’s inhabit this music, alone and not alone,’ they write as an invitation for us to join them in the America brought to life in these lines, an America of homelessness and loss, heartache and hope. With their countercultural sensibilities and ear to the musicality of language, these poems remind us of the inherent political nature of the American poet and American poetry.”
—Gerry LaFemina, author of The Story of Ash, lead singer of the Downstrokes, and professor of English, Frostburg State University

"Simultaneous Revolutions is "a riveting story of downtown America in new age poetics.""
—Rebecca Anne Banks, Subterranean Blue Poetry (Toronto, Canada)

“Marcus Colasurdo and G.H. Mosson in Simultaneous Revolutions have at once harmonized and soloed voices of the unknown and famous as well as of marginalized characters in cities that mirror today’s urban communities. Speakers pull you in and keep you enthralled until the last image on the last page.”
—Meryl Peters, Santa Barbara City College

“Simultaneous Revolutions is a remarkable collection. Filled with flashes of beauty, deep love for the underdog, and a contagiously joyful spirit, these pages, read from the vantage point of our modern hellscape, call on us to stop waiting on the revolution and look around. It’s already here, everywhere.”
—Jamie Longazel, John Jay College, author of Undocumented Fears

“Simultaneous Revolutions swings between two intense voices: a worldly voice that speaks difficult truths, and a voice that radiates with attentive joy. Both voices are wholly informed by music. Colasurdo and Mosson aim at change for the outside world of hunger and homelessness, and to change for our inner worlds too, through simple awareness. As they write in the poem, Sherwood Gardens: ‘No, it’s not that you go looking for it, exactly / but here it is.’”
—Patric Pepper, poet and author of Temporary Apprehensions (WWPH) and Zoned Industrial (Banty)

About the Authors

G.H. Mosson is a poet, lawyer, activist, and author of three prior books of poetry. His poetry has appeared in The Hollins Critic, the Tampa Review, the Cincinnati Review, Measure, and also won fellowships from the Puffin Foundation and Johns Hopkins University. From 2003 to 2010, he edited Poems against War: A Journal of Poetry and Action (Wasteland Press).

Marcus Colasurdo is an underground “classic beat” poet who has published several books and given inspiring readings across venues of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Virginia, and California. He often combines art, music, and audience at performances to raise money for worthy causes.

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