Just So You Know

Edmund Conti’s Just So You Know is a joy from first line to last. Ordinary life is often raised to the level of high comedy (sleeplessly turning and tossing while listening to noises from the refrigerator), but at times Conti deals with the extraordinary (as when he transcribes an e-mail from God). A master of a dazzling variety of forms—ingenious stanzas, haiku, parody, verse epigrams, even free verse—Conti rewards and regales To be genuinely funny in free verse is no mean feat. In one memorable tour de force, stray lines from Shakespeare are stitched together into a coherent new poem. I salute this long overdue collection by one of our most highly skilled living poets. It’s pure enjoyment. Buy a copy for yourself and a dozen to give away. X. J. Kennedy

If you need a chuckle or twenty (and who doesn’t, these days?) buy this book. Edmund Conti is best known for writing short, funny poems in rhyme and meter. But as Just So You Know proves, he can write long and funny too. Sometimes he rhymes virtuosically (apparatus/pat us; gem/apothegm) and at others he opts for breezy light verse. What’s constant, though, is Conti’s Imagination, his fun with language, and his puckish, addictive, no-way-you-can-frown-through-it wit.

Melissa Balmain