SICK

SICK is a collection of thirty-five poems by John Patrick Flannery, written across a decade in Los Angeles and beyond.

They are poems about hating your job and loving the night. About relationships that start hot and end cold. About the criminal life and what it costs. About getting older without getting wiser, and about finding something worth smiling at anyway.

The voice is direct, often profane, and always honest. These are not poems about poetry. They are poems about being alive in a city that doesn't care whether you make it, working jobs that grind you down, loving people who don't love you back the same way, and waking up at three in the morning with nowhere to put any of it.

Flannery writes the way people actually think - in short bursts, in repetition, in the rhythms of someone who has been around long enough to know that the situation doesn't improve much, but that there is still something darkly funny about the whole thing if you look at it right.

SICK opens with attitude and moves through identity, the city, the road, relationships, and the inner life before landing on its final poem - The Phone, written in 1996 - a quiet, devastating prose piece about waiting for someone to call who never does. It is the oldest piece in the collection and the most different in tone, and it earns its place at the end.

This is not a book for readers who want poetry to be gentle or decorative. It is a book for people who have worked bad jobs, lived in bad apartments, stayed in relationships too long, driven through cities they hated and couldn't leave, and still managed to find something worth writing down.

Fans of Charles Bukowski, Denis Johnson, and Raymond Carver will recognize the territory. So will anyone who has ever been sick of it all and kept going anyway.