Broken Color By Dean Kostos

"Dean Kostos’s new collection of poems, Broken Color, is absolutely amazing! The book is broken down into five parts, and the title of each is a meaningful color. The first section deals with his youth and its strange reality. Shot through with sadness, his upbringing kicks in immediately. From “Us-ward” he states, “I wade in boyhood’s creek. / Currents reverse.” Later, Kostos writes, “letter / never sent to childhood’s house. / That building is now a scar.” Several times Dean mentions Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I would say that this painting sums up Kostos’s style perfectly: an underlying realism drenched with a surrealist patina. He also lists a number of artists, including one of my favorites, J. M. W. Turner, but the artist whose work came to mind after I finished this book was Hieronymus Bosch. Totally recommended."

—Ron Kolm, contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine and author of Night Shift