Böcker av Ryan Quinn Flanagan

'Wheel House' seems to depict a scene or place described as a "wheel house," which is more akin to a shed filled with various types and sizes of wheels. The wheels appear to be neglected and earthbound, some leaning against the walls. The machinery that once used these wheels is no longer there, leaving only the skeletal remains of the original vision and craftsmanship.The poem conveys a sense of nostalgia and simplicity. Despite the mastery being lost, there is a certain charm in the wooden structure, which sparks the imagination and invokes a sense of playfulness. The "rollicking chuckwagon imagination" suggests a lively and vivid mental landscape associated with this place.Wheel House More of a shed, really. This wheel house, this army of spokes across each wall. All shapesand sizes. A few of the latest offerings foreverearthbound and on neglected half-lean.The machinery long gone, so that only theskeleton remains. That original vison.The craftsmanship. With mastery over nothing, including the Self, there is a simple wooden charmsnaking through the mustiness, coiling ever-tighteraround your rollicking chuckwagon imagination.And the deafening quiet, never forget that! Naked toesover dirt floors, playful drag marks of theeternal straggler.

On the Other Side of Walls by Ryan Quinn Flanagan. Published by Marathon Books, 2023.

a book of poetry by Canadian author Ryan Quinn FlanaganRyan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Evergreen Review, Red Fez, Horror Sleaze Trash and The Blue Collar Review. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck."Movie stars, birds, lizards, muggers, and sharks in an alphabet milkshake. Ryan comes out with haymakers and steel-toed boots. Crescendos, bombs, fuck you corvettes, and elevator men.The Mighty Quinn is from Ontario, Canada; where bears drive trucks and eat beaver meatloaf. I recommend this book; Ry is widely published. Since Bukowski is gone and my friend, Lyn Lifshin; I think Flanagan will become and deserves to be top wrangler on the small press ranch."--Catfish McDaris, 1-26-23"Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a twisted bastard and I love it. His poetry is funnier than most. And it's the dark kind. Is it ironic that gallows humor gives me pangs of nostalgia for the nineties when people didn't give a fuck? This poet still doesn't. I find his acid tongue refreshing, Scenes of cynics, surly saints, the lost and lonely; Kiss the Heathens reports from the front lines of a working class world where the punchlines make painful points, and only a smirk can save your sanity."-Westley Heine, author of Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician & Squatter"The moments in Kiss the Heathens are grounded in the incidents of life-good or bad-but sprinkled with imagined insanity, so they feel real, even when they aren't. "She seems to know I don't have it in me,/staying in the room where her ex-husband used/to beat her for $49/night,/the nice couple that own the place/imploring us to pet their dying cone-headed dog/as they hand us the key." It's as though Flanagan takes us with him around town-to a pet store, a hotel, a gas station, a restaurant or its dishroom-and all the while he's sign-posting what he makes of it all, with a teasing economy of language. "Of course I believe in god. I have a cat, don't I?""-Kerry Trautman, author of Unknowable Things

Ryan Quinn Flanagan's Minotaur Snow is an urban menagerie of very human poems. Difficult situations, individual foibles, that unescapable rush of the modern city; the sights and sounds and smells and touch, all told with great humor and at times, compassion. Flanagan peoples the landscape in such a way that his experiences become your experiences, his revelations and perspectives a busy populous of comings and goings all captured in a language that is both highly accessible and littered with odd notions or turns of phrase. Minotaur Snow above all else is a book that captures what is timeless to our shared experience, but with a fierce individuality that washes over everything like a heavy falling snow.