The Egatz Epitaph

Here’s what poet Dick Allen had to say about Beneath Stars Long Extinct.

“I’m really taken with Beneath Stars Long Extinct. I’ve never read poems quite like these: poems at once sardonic and sad and celebratory as they detail a late 20th Century-early 21st Century unmarried male searching for and finding, yes, true love. But along with this passionate search come Ron Egatz’s beautifully rendered stories of others: a hitch-hiking father who meets George Raft, women who die young, lonely near-failure rockers. Egatz’s vibrant and extremely tactile poems conduct us into the urban world of choices and relationships in such an expert way that his fascinations become ours. How he illumines our age is not unlike how F. Scott Fitzgerald illuminated and defined his. Egatz’s long overdue first collection, then, is a unique portrait of our urbanized times. I should add that each poem is able to stand alone even while each provides another facet to the book’s central searching motifs. Consequently, there are an unusual number of “keeper” poems here, poems you want or even need to read immediately to friends, particularly those in their 30s and 40s (email them, twitter them, text them, but even better gift them with a copy of this book), necessary poems in this most compelling and necessary collection.”

—Dick Allen,
author of Present Vanishing: Poems, Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected, among others.