"smooth as glass and lit with intelligence…… a juxtaposition between bopping, modern jazz and the formal rhyme and styles. The combinations were delightful, a real plus."

—Jerry Smaldone, author All Flesh Shall See It Together

 

 
"Homer would clap! As he led Odysseus through mythical challenges, SETH leads the reader through human trials—poverty, desire, injustice, racism, and a longing for truth, that we say what we mean. In A Black Odyssey, the poet draws on sources from Homer to the Bible to nursery rhymes. A 'Samson wielding syllables,' he wrestles with what it means to be alive in these times. A triumph of tension wedded to deep, deep pleasure."
 

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author, 

The Miracle Already Happening and Holding Three Things at Once

"SETH is a force of nature. This diverse, vibrant book is modeled, like Joyce's Ulysses, on Homer's ancient epic and uses it as an allegorical scaffolding for SETH's own experience as a Black man in contemporary America – an  experience filled with joys, sorrows, beauty, ugliness, anger, love and other creative contradictions. SETH's language runs the gamut from the vernacular to the Elizabethan, and his art includes everything from pattern poems, free verse, prose poems, sonnets, and even parodies of Mother Goose: political trouble-making, love songs, fiery sermons, quiet meditations and loud questions for God. Even as this poet writes that "In the end we shall all stand wordless," his own forceful words inspire us to realize that this is not only his life—it is ours as well."

        

—David J. Rothman, Poetry Concentration Director, Western State College MFA in Creative Writing; Colorado Book Award Finalist in Poetry for The Elephant's Chiropractor