This Is Not a Skyscraperexamines New York City through a surrealist lens. Like the title of Magrittes painting, This is not a pipe, these poems question perceptions of the metropolis. While NYC entices talents that swarm its stages, museums, runways, and readings, throngs of outsiders live on the citys margins, silenced. Among the grotesqueries of corruption, an African immigrant is killed by police in a case of mistaken identity. His disembodied voice introduces the book. Many of these poems attempt to speak for the others existing on the peripheral, whose perspectives have been abandoned.
Do you ever ask why, after a fresh hair cut, your stylist cant wait to show you thebackof your head? Dean Kostos, in his pithy fifth collection,This Is Not a Skyscraper, will likewise twist you in your chair. He lures readers into his hand-held mirror (akalooking glass), like a practiced stylist, meticulously exposing what we might have otherwise missed. An itinerate storyteller, his orbit is the city of New York: her museums, her parks, her Coney Island sideshows. He finds metaphor and refuge in tropes like thecapeas a cover up, unveiling a fantasy of a man disrobed by a barber, then as a mother snaps on a cape to reveal a rabbit, and again, in an early lover, his arms a cape / around me. Villon, Gorky, ChristoKostos enlists an army of artists to deploy his sinewy ideas. The title of this gathering of sixty-two poems alludes to Magrittes Ceci nest pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). Andthis is nota collection youll want to pass up. His poems are peopled by a hive of voices that become one / voice, their mouths the muzzles / of guns; each will leave you blinking at what you are looking at, admiring its shape, and wanting to see more.
Elaine Sexton, author ofSleuthandCauseway
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With craft and acuity, Dean Kostos, as an intrepid and empathetic poet-reporter, l³
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