Catching Tigers in Red Weather

Book excerpt: Poetry. CATCHING TIGERS IN RED WEATHER, winner of the Three Candles Press Open Book Award (selected by Joan Larkin), is a collection of poems by a new voice that combines montage cut-ups with an informing dialectic that gives us a wide array of contemporary American viewpoints. By turns playful and serious, he deftly embraces and criticizes a popular culture that is too complicated to dismiss with swift and simple comments. It is a book of rich rewards. "Andrew Demcak is a poet unafraid of the harrowing, sometimes revelatory nature of modern life. Above all, these poems evoke the moments when people come together, both in violent and romantic ways, and they also train a keen eye on the aftermaths of our partings. CATCHING TIGERS IN RED WEATHER will remind everyone who reads it that beauty and fear come into the world hand-in-hand. Like any significant poetry, it will alter its readers' perspectives forever"--Kaya Oakes.