All years present challenges, but, none more than 2020. Everything seems frozen, danger and doubt prevailed over reason and civility. Finding your way, staying in touch with your essential being requiring all your energy and sapped your passion. This is where poetry enters, to offer humor, perspective and grit. And this, Muscular Poetry is not flowers, roses, sweet kisses and birds singing. It is about the bumps and curves of a life lived real, hard and honestly. It is all our lives, the unvarnished truth.

Muscular Poetry is a word that requires no LSD , peyote , or to be read with some good weed. It is reality- raw and lean- served up with grit and honesty. No flowers and roses, sweet kisses, and all the other bull of certain poets. It reflects Bukowski, Fante, Kerouac and Ginsberg- men living life to the fullest- in touch with the present and living unafraid of the future. It guides men through the bumps and curves of a life lived hard, through divorce, children, and career hghs and lows. Every verse is about exactly the way our lives, are as modern men, the unvarnished truth.

Poems for Men Kemo Chen is a journalist, adventurer, contrarian, and street corner philosopher. He has rubbed shoulders with moguls, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and fighting men from the Golan to Chechnya. he's traveled from Xinjiang to the caves of Qumran. An advocate of all men finding themselves and realizing their potential. An avowed enemy of the obvious.

The poems in Terrance Hayes's book, Muscular Music, are atypical of most writers' first books of poetry. One cannot categorize these poems simply as confessional, narrative, or lyrical. They are all these things at once. They move beyond usual explorations of childhood or family to blend themes and influences that range from Neruda to Coltrane, Fat Albert to Orpheus, John Shaft to Gershwin. This book gives us an almost Whitmanesque account of an America, and an African American, replete with grace and imperfection. Moreover, it gives us a voice that does not sacrifice truth for music or music for accessibility. At the end of a poem that includes Bill Strayhorn, Andrew Carnegie, and Dante, Hayes says, I know one of the rings of hell is reserved for men who refuse to weep. So I let it come. And it does not move from me. These lines reflect what is always at the core of Hayes's poetry: a faithfulness, not to traditional forms or themes, but to heart and honesty. It is a core bounded by and cradled by a passion for the music in all things.

Alberto Ríos literally charms his border town--this is magical realism at its best.

Poems for MenKemo Chen is a journalist, adventurer, contrarian, and street corner philosopher. He has rubbed shoulders with moguls, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and fighting men from the Golan to Chechnya. he's traveled from Xinjiang to the caves of Qumran. An advocate of all men finding themselves and realizing their potential. An avowed enemy of the obvious.