It’s a day early, but Vital Decay by Timothy Dodd has officially been published!! I thought today was the 16th; Buk’s birthday! I was wrong. That’s why I put the files in final review yesterday. Then I realized I was a day off. Oh well, things always happen for a reason. I’m sure there’s some hidden one behind why things went the way they did with this book. It’ll probably reveal itself later. Or, maybe not. Maybe we will never know. Yet it’s available all the same.
Brother Dodd will have author copies soon! Get in touch with him if you’d like a signed book. Here’s the Amazon link. If y’all do grab a copy, leave a review! Word of mouth is important. People want to know what they’re about to read. Please spread the word by sharing this post if you can’t afford to buy one right now. That helps as well.
Also, I’ve had a few readers from outside of the US contact me to say they’re having a hard time finding our books on their country’s Amazon site. If you go to the book category and type in the ASIN, they usually pop right up!
Vital Decay ASIN:
B0CFCVDK9J
I have a copy on the way as well. Pics will be posted when it gets here.
Love Y’all, Write On,
JDCIV
🤟💀📚
“Timothy Dodd writes with the energy and frenzy of a man being chased by assassins, hell hounds, the police. His words race across busy highways. They jump from tall buildings but land on their feet. They vanish into dead-end alleys as though a door opened in one wall then closed behind him. The poems in this book are vivid descriptions of scenes mixed with meditations on life-meanings and interplays between the sacred and profane. Dodd stares into the abyss and doesn’t blink. Vital Decay is a marvelous collection and a wild ride. Strap yourself down for this one.”
—Ace Boggess, author of The Prisoners and Escape Envy
“Timothy Dodd plays with words, to play with readers’ perception and reception, not unlike Gregory Corso, but at times his observations are also acerbic, not unlike Charles Bukowski. His overall concept of the people populating his poetry as full-blown characters — not mere extensions of himself, the poet — is a semi-biographical approach that reminds somewhat of Edgar Lee Masters. To combine elements of such poets as these in one voice, and then to have a unique voice in the midst of such influences is no mean feat.
VITAL DECAY will push you, as much as pull you along. Some poems lean towards prose, while others are highly imagistic, and some concrete, while others near a blend of magic-realism. This explains lines such as “Like a Halloween mask / she arrived at pavement…”
Dodd namechecks Denton Welch, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Ronnie James Dio, and you can see their shadows looming over some poems. There is little distinction between high culture and low culture in the inspiration and the references in many of his poems, and in so doing this poet’s voice is less encumbered by the cultural bias and classism, that makes the street poet and the academic poet most easily recognizable, quantifiable, and readily fitted for a label – anything from Camus to Marvel Comics shows up in Dodd’s poems. These approaches encourage a certain unpredictability, that in turn opens one up to being caught off guard, one’s cynicism challenged, coerced into an openness of possibility: one never knows what the next poem will bring.”
—David Alec Knight, author of LEPER MOSH (Cajun Mutt Press, 2022), recipient of The Ted Plantos Memorial Award For Poetry, 2021.
