Book Blurbs And Commentary On A. D. Winans' Writing
He seems to me, quite simply, a natural writer of
extraordinary talent. By this, I mean that everything I read by
him fills me with pleasure because of a beautifully natural and
easy use of language.
---Colin
Wilson, author
Here is a word slinger, A. D. Winans, a poet of clarity, an
artful man who makes it all seem so easy. A captive within his
home port,
San Francisco. A voice nailed onto the soil of his
native land, capable of writing as he speaks.
---Neeli Cherkovski, poet and biographer
A. D. Winans is a man in search of his soul. He has great
heart and compassion for people and his native city, San
Francisco. I like his uncompromising spirit. He pulls no
punches.
---Jack Micheline, poet and writer
I find the title of your book (It Serves You Right To
Suffer) admirable, and I like the poems too for their vigor and
social relevance. Good work!
---Hayden Caruth, poet
A.D. Winans is one of the few writers I have met (and I have
met too God Damned many of them) who doesn't act like a writer
or think of himself continually as a writer, and maybe that is
why he writes better than they do. I always prefer a poet I can
tolerate for more than ten minutes; that's rare, and so is A.D.
---Charles
Bukowski
Winans lays creeping myth on the reader as easy as
Kenneth Patchen.
--William Harold, English Profesor, Wisconsin University
I like your stuff (The Reagan Psalms) very much. It's a fine
tribute to the pronunciations of the White House Toby.
---Studs
Terkel
A.D. Winans has maintained a consistent dedication to his
craft as the author of many books and hundreds of poems and
short stories.
---Peter
Coyote, Actor and Writer
Beneath everything, above everything, in your work seems a
human and humane compassion toward the human drama and its
actors and actresses.
---Antler, poet
A. D. Winans is an honest poet. He creates poetry that is
forceful and also possesses a strong integrity. His poems are
dark and beautiful at the same time. His poetry reminds me of a
great blues song. Poetry at its best.
---Fredrik Oster, Factotum Press,
Sweden
A.D. Winans' poems, in my opinion, more than matches that of
any living poet I know in the USA
---Trevor Reeves, Publisher, Square One Press,
New Zealand
"Winans" This Land Is Not My Land demonstrates his wide
range. Winans disowns much of modern America. He puts me in
mind of that character in
Paul Theroux's
Mosquito Coast. He takes
Allen Ginsberg's America to new places.
---Richard Real, Beat Scene
If you expected the raw facts, hard hitting honesty of A.D.
Winans, you won't be disappointed. This Land Is Not My Land
stings with the robust delivery of political comments that is
Winans.
---Black Bear Press
Your
Panama war poems resonate for me more powerfully and
memorably than any war poems I have read, including WW1 poets
like Rubert Brooks and
Wilfred Owen.
---Harold Norse, Poet
Winans writes primarily in the first person, using the
contemporary cadence of short sentences (in a manner similiar to
Brautigan, Bukowski, or even John Rechy) to create a lucide
transpatent style that presents a story with economy and
directness, neither developing literary conceits nor reaching
for involved metaphor. This deceptively simply narrative style
creates a complex and subtly adept voice that presents (in the
best tradition of short story writing) a singular, realistically
detailed and personal moment in such a way that it becomes
luminous, and a broader significance is revealed through the
particular.
---Poetry Northwest Review of Books