Dan Wright’s writing hits like a good friend updating you on the past few years after making eye contact in a moderately crowded bar in an industrial part of town. After sharing a hug that could pancake a Volvo, he sips a cheap beer beloved by the people of that bar. He opens himself up like a prognostic fish on a cutting board tired of Heraclitus’s eternal river of sewage, but never willing to quit and always willing to take that fisherman’s knife and tell the world, ‘Thank you but I can do it myself!’

-RC Patterson, author of Black Magic

If we didn’t love America so much, we wouldn’t hate America so much. That’s the spirit of Dan Wright’s Love Letters from the Underground. These poems are love letters to Americana, American dreams-some bygone, others that never existed-and a dying planet that could keep living were it not for human nature. Yet there is levity in the verse, and the book reads easy. At once a pessimistic optimist and a benevolent nihilist, Wright turns a critical yet ever-loving eye to planet and inhabitant, nation and citizen, home and self, in this maverick third full-length collection.

-Kim Vodicka, author of The Elvis Machine

Dan Wright is not concerned with contemporary poetic conventions, he’s not writing to an audience of lit mag editors, he’s writing poems that speak to the people in his world. Wright takes us on the road with him, he takes us to bars, let’s us listen in on his playlists of scratchy vinyl and stretched out cassette tapes. He puts us in Greyhound stations, NYC subway stations, the shotgun seat of another poet’s Saturn. He takes us out to the world in the bad part of town, in the small towns invisible from the highway, lets us look at the Pacific through a Midwesterner’s eyes. There is always movement and discovery and the occasional side-eye glance at the man behind the curtain who, as we all know, is there and that the bastard is a crook. All of these poems are visceral and immediate but contain dark beauty and harsh truth.

-Shawn Pavey, author of Survival Tips for the

Pending Apocalypse