Advice and Other Absurdities for My Daughter

Praise for Advice and Other Absurdities for My Daughter

Tom Formaro has some advice for us, and I’m following it — every bit. A poem like “Clarification,” for example, tells us in a sheer list what the poet means: turns out, he means anything and everything. His beloved daughter (but, really, he’s addressing us) needs advice on traveling, on bank runs, on floods, on nuclear annihilation, on summer heat, on being cool (“follow edges”), on courtship, on bad advice, on gardening, on how to deal when “something good” finally comes along. That goodness finally is to be found in the very act of writing, poems where when “I confess the untrue / it becomes me.” The pun is intentional: it is becoming, or beautiful; and, in giving advice to a beloved, he is becoming someone who can write about love.
– Al Filreis, Kelly Writers House, founder of ModPo

In Tom Formaro’s Advice and Other Absurdities for My Daughter, we have an exploration of and delight in the medium: language. If these poems feel strange, it may be because the poems reflect the ultimate strangeness of all existence, a strangeness found in even the most “mundane” moments, which are, of course, anything but. These poems insist it is impossible not to mean. Something. Many things. Read on. Enact the journey through the many registers you encounter, create, and feel here—gaining, via Tom’s poetic music, imagery, and reflection, a heightened awareness of habit in need of surprise.
– David Wolf, author of Seven

In Tom Formaro’s Advice and Other Absurdities for My Daughter we enter worlds rich with inquiries into language, into life, with his ideas/questions/allusions/connections: drumming, manifesting the past/present/future, the mysterious, the magical, the conundrums, the truths.

Between the red truck & the dance in the labyrinth & the self-portraits & Emily exist the oceans, soldiers, angels, roses—his views/words bold meandering aware, wise humorous binary erudite, with the brilliance of such lines as “I left out the line that dreamt me into awareness” or “Did I ever tell you about the time a blind rose / liberated a forgotten quantum mechanic line by line.”

A search for self, a search for meaning; a remembrance, a beginning—Tom’s poems inspire us into new ways of seeing & engaging with the realities & verities of existence.
– Marcia Arrieta, author of the voyages

“Follow your footsteps as they fall” writes Tom Formaro in his introduction to Advice and Other Absurdities for My Daughter, “… you may have just discovered you’re dancing.” But not the stately waltzes of Vienna, of grand ballrooms. Rather the tapping rhythm of Astaire, of Bojangles Robinson, with an overdub of words that also dance.

Those words bounce off, feed off one another in a virtuoso display. They play with consecutive consonants & vowel sounds, invent an almost onomatopoeia. Meaning is left behind, but a new meaning replaces it. “In other news the othered were outnumbered / and undercounted in a bebop version of  Offenbach / on Sunshine”

My advice is that this is a collection to be devoured, accompanied by something like Miles Davis’ “You’re Under Arrest,” & enjoyed time after time.
– Mark Young, author of The Magritte Poems 

Tom Formaro dives deep into the poetic absurdity of advice and dismembers its certainty. The answer is not that the answer is always out of reach, the answer is that there is no answer. Advice is an improvised cipher of realism, a free jazz of horizons, and Formaro blows parenthetical breaths into the same crooked horn, bending a syncopated stillness of maybes through twists and turns, the palliative quest for a certain truth leaving behind trails of phrasing and phasing. Formaro shows the best way forward is sideways, preferably in a zigzag of polite explosions, circumventing whether yesterday should apologize to tomorrow. Listen carefully, do not listen at all. His wisdom reveals its papier-mâché skeleton: earnest, elaborate, and gloriously unhinged.
– petro c. k., editor of dadakuku