Romancing Gravity
Silver Birch Press, 2013
In Romancing Gravity, Daniel Romo has written a memoir in poetry. It is the poetry of growing up in Southern California, of childhood games and fear, of adolescent dreams and braggadocio, and a young man’s coming into his own as a man and a poet. There are echoes of popular culture and the poems dance to the beat of an urban pulse. There are hallucinatory prose poems and sometimes the speaker sounds like an old-testament prophet disguised as a homeless man, calling down curses on our decadent world. Lost children wave to us from the floor of the ocean. Do they wave in greeting or are they taking their leave? Either way, the reader waves back, the reader wants to dance or say “Yes!” to these marvelous poems. — Richard Garcia
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Praise:
Daniel Romo’s Romancing Gravity is a terrific collection—at once edgy, comical, and big-hearted. I was immediately drawn to his streetwise grit, his luminous vision of urban America. These are poems that swagger, that “boom-boom sound” and leave your ears ringing. — David Hernandez
Daniel Romo finds surprising lyricism in school classrooms, TV shows, and yard sales in his southern California neighborhoods. Celebratory, irreverent, and deeply personal, the poems in Romancing Gravity capture the quotidian in stunning ways and reveal what keeps us earthbound. — Molly Bendall
Reviews:
Romo’s is a voice and point of view that grows on you the more you read. He is both empathetic and clear-eyed, but not overly sentimental. In short, Romo is the kind of role model you could safely entrust your children with, knowing that he remembers the pitfalls of youth and what is necessary, now, to move on with life. — Misfit Magazine
Reading Romancing Gravity, by Daniel Romo, was like taking a guided tour through bad neighborhoods, troubled schools, the past, the present, and the air. — Escape Into Life