Roadside Press, 2026
ISBN 979-8-9946833-3-0
If I had the book with me
or the poem memorized
I’d recite it for her
under the neon Abita beer sign
but she has since moved on
to Garth Brooks
and that is just not conducive
to esteemed literature.
– from “Fame and Fancy Literature”
These poems are poems that have lived and survived to tell the tale. It’s a collection of dueling love songs and love lost songs. Naturally, because Cirillo is a self-described Quarter Rat, New Orleans is as much a subject / love object as a the woman he writes so sadly and eloquently about losing and the one he talks about in “Special Ocassion”:
For the first time
in a long time
I am not waking up alone
on this birthday morning
and that is a gift. (72)
Poems like this one and others, including “Mix Up at the Erin Rose,” “The Big Game,” and “The Greatest Bartender in New Orleans” recreate the bars and characters of a city whose bars and characters are more mythic, more haunting, and more taunting than any American city. This would be enough to shift the weight of the poetry for any number of fine poets writing now; but Cirillo’s voice in these poems is as loud and distinct as that one guy at the end of the bar who’s talked to everyone at least once and who everyone knows by sight, if not by first name. His is the voice of the experienced everyman in a city full with people who need to be larger than life; his poems are like the currents that keep the Steamer Natchez afloat in the river and keep life in the Quarter turning in spite of natural disasters and global pandemics.
I feel a certain affinity for these poems because I lived in New Orleans, in Mid-City, more than 20 years ago. There are places and street names in these poems that ring familiar from my own wanderings; but because New Orleans is a city of perpetual resurrections, the city he describes is also an entirely different city from the one that lives in my memory. And I am damned grateful for that; because cities that end up preserved in amber, wrapped in nostalgia and marketing jingoism, do not survive. I need to live in a timeline where New Orleans is alive and thriving, crying, bleeding, and surviving.
It would be a disservice to simply call these poems “gritty” and “real,” because they’re also elegiac and full of longing. The speaker in poems like “Bouquet,” who cannot preserve beauty or recapture a lost love, gives us an inside look into one man’s city that is both full of life and full of memories. You have to have the rot along with things that grow. And the sadness and longing that runs through these poems — even sometimes a note in what are otherwise lighter poems — elevates the “grit” and “real” of these poems onto an entirely different plane. This poetry is utterly and unapologetically human in a world that seems bent in rotting into something algorithmic and artificial.
– Mick Parsons
Listen for Todd Cirillo on the upcoming podcast! More details soon.
Also by Todd on Roadside Press:
Disposable Darlings