Sunday, November 22, 2015

Violent Outbursts, Thaddeus Rutkowski

READING THADDEUS RUTKOWSKI’S latest book “Violent Outbursts” is addictive. You pick it up planning to read one or two short stories, or are they flash fiction, or poetry, and then you find yourself unable to put the book down until you have finished the whole thing. So what exactly are these compelling short pieces, most only one page long?
           Alan Catlin, writing in MisFit Magazine states that “Rutkowski’s pieces are to prose poems what Russell Edson’s are to fiction. Thad’s work has many of the same elements of Edson’s best work: absurd, outrageous situations and resolutions, deft biting satirical humor, and a mock, generally self-effacing narrator.  So go with flash fictions. It works as well as any other designation does. This is good, highly charged, terrific, distinctive writing no matter what you call it.”
          The book has gotten numerous favorable comments. Author Ed Lin calls Rutkowski; “the original language gangster (who) tips over words and lets them fall on you.” And Max Blagg states that Rutkowski’s collection: “skirts the edge of psychological revelation, with hints of darker meaning coursing below the surface.”
          Emerson has said that a writer, in order to write well, must give oneself wholly to their feelings as one has them, and not to thesauri or dictionaries. In “Violent Outbursts” it appears that Thaddeus Rutkowski has taken this direction to a good end.

SG

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Violent Outbursts
Thaddeus Rutkowski
ISBN 978-1-941550-58-8
124 pages 16.00 USD
Spuyten Duyvil
Brooklyn, New York



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2 comments:

Unknown said...

I have gotten many good comments on this review. Thanks again for posting it.

Unknown said...
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