Category Archives: LiL Book Review

2026, LiL Book Review, poetry

Hanging at the toblako shop with Dan Flore III: A Review of A Tub, A Cigarette, A Blank Stare

Open Arts Press, LLC
First Digital Edition
openartspress.com

Download Dan’s Book Here (Free!)

 

because once I awoke from a nap
to discover the bathroom rug on fire
I lifted it up
with smoke in my face,
threw it in the tub
and started the water
putting out the fire

– from “A Tub, A Cigarette, A Blank Stare” (46)

 

When I ran across the word “toblacko” in the poem “Negative Balance at the Flea Market Lice Market,” I knew I was reading someone I could have known back in the day. It’s not necessarily a common term. Some might mistake it for a typo. It’s not. “Toblacko” is the saved dregs of cigarette butts, cut out and saved to roll and smoke later. Understanding this is the key to understanding the poems in this digitally published collection of poems by Dan Flore III, who also earlier this year saw Jumbo Poetry published by Crying Heart Press and last year, Everything Must Go, published by Cajun Mutt. The great themes in Flore’s work are the everyday moments, the silent crushing moments, the things people don’t like to talk about, like what it’s like to live poor. There’s a way to do it and it’s one of those things that tends to get overlooked either with the usual Capitalist bootstrap bullshit or with an overly sentimental pathos. The term confessional might apply to some of the poems, but that’s only because he doesn’t shy away from any topic. When his poems address something painful, like having to choose between his parents in divorce court in “10 Year Old Judas at the Custody Battle,” his straight words and direct tone make you understand that memories aren’t just scars. Sometimes memories bleed in aeternum.

 

nobody’s niceties
could get one thing
out of my head though
that by making this decision
I was choosing one over the other (29)

 

The poetry of Dan Flore III sings differently in the world. Are they real? Yes. Do they eschew flowery language, in particular maybe words like eschew? Yes.  But the thing that truly separates Flore from the pack is the filterless way in which he approaches the world. Each of his poems is an open wound that’s reexamined, cleaned, bandaged, and opened again. As readers we’re given these moments of a child’s pain through the filter of an adult looking back at what he survived. In “If Tracy Chapman Were My Aunt,” the speaker writes about both the weight that come with having no choice but to escape and the need for verification that everything is going to be alright: 

 

and at the end of the night
Tracy Chapman would say
“so nephew Danny,
sounds like you’ve been doing a good job takin’ care of your mom.”

and lead me up the stairs
to put all of my tears
in her guitar case (30)

 

These poems ache and communicate that ache with precise, direct language; they’re lovely and sad and exist in a world in which everything is broken and some things heal, but not necessarily properly. 

-Mick Parsons

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2026, LiL Book Review, poetry

Love Poems Disguised as Drinking Poems: A Review of Todd Cirillo’s HAPPY HOUR HEART OF NEW ORLEANS

Roadside Press, 2026

ISBN 979-8-9946833-3-0

Book cover for Todd Cirillo's Happy Hour Heart of New Orleans

BUY HIS BOOK HERE

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

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