Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the Poemfone Poets

What are are holding right now in your hands is a book. Not a telephone reciever, which is how most of the poems in this collection were first transmitted…There are plenty of examples of this spreading of one art form or another through popular mediums. There are all those wonderful Russian Constructivist posters, Dr. Alphabet’s public poetry gatherings on football fields, Dada caberet antics, and various forms of street theatr…Essentially what all of these movements were trying to do was expand the playing field called art. By making the field bigger they gave us all more room to frolic. They pushed art right out of the dusty museums and smack dab into your lives… Poetry should be everywhere, and slowly but surely it’s infiltrating our lives. We are gla dto be the instruments of this infiltration. –from the Introduction

Featuring Penny Arcade, Tish Benson, Nicole Blackman, David Cameron, Xavier Cavazos, Todd Colby, Matthew Courtney, M. Doughty, Kathy Ebel, Annie Elliot, Janice Erlbaum, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, John S. Hall, Bob Holman, Christian X. Hunter, Shannon Ketch, Bobby Miller, Wanda Phipps, Lee Ranaldo, Shut-Up Shelly, Hal Sirowitz, Sparrow, Spiro, Edwin Torres, Emily XYZ

With unabashed fervor the Poemfone poets are redefining poetry as we know it. Archaic literary rules that have never been bent have suddenly been broken., and Versus That Hurt chronicles this poetic phenomenon. This is a revolutionary gathering of disparate and brash talent that is not to be missed.