Acclaim
What fellow poets have said
American Romance is about anger and forgiving. It’s about our struggle to accept human imperfection and our common humanity…Schain’s work invites us to become regulars. I’d drink at his bar and buy his books. His work remind us that the best poetry, like the best bartending, is psycho-therapeutic.
Eliot Schain is a treasure—a poet with a sharp edge and a broad canvass. Some artists have irony, some have vision; Schain has both, and tests them against each other with fire and wit. The results are wild, beautiful, and necessary."
There’s a rawness, a brashness to Eliot Schain’s poetry that vividly angles it out against the bland, beveled, ‘workshop’ American; at the same time, Schain writes with an accuracy of observation, an emotional honesty that gives his poetry real weight against the run of easy, potshotting ‘street’ or ‘neo-beat’…
An unforgettable modern voice… In Schain’s poetry, the inexhaustible American hunger confronts its limits—wilderness defiled by industry, the nuclear family gone ballistic, love turned impossible. Here widom and madness live side-by-side, take the reader’s hand, and walk us toward the uncertain future. Once you have heard his cadences, you will not forget.