Dreams of a Viking Wedding

These are poems of a son, caregiver to a father, whose 'mop and broom/put me through college' and who now faces 'A wall of white bottles/[that] stands in front of him like a firing squad, ' and of a middle-aged bridegroom, skating through the relationship stresses of wedding preparations and finding that 'decades of bachelorhood/have acclimated me/to dead silence and cold dinner.' Don't let the wit and seemingly carefree flips of phrase here fool you-if you can stop chuckling long enough, you will note the fine craftsmanship and mature earned wisdom of these poems. And the heart.

-Kelley Jean White, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship Recipient, author of Toxic Environment & Two Birds in Flame

Dreams of a Viking Wedding is filled with John Muth's arrow-sharp observations, sometimes acidic wit, and always-engaging use of language. Muth gives readers a very satisfying arc, an autobiography we can follow a poem-at-a-time. In each poem, we feel we get to know the poet all the better. Muth's poetry is that of the Everyman, yet the poet's voice is unmistakably his own in this excellent collection. I enjoyed reading Dreams of a Viking Wedding and will return to re-enjoy it again soon.

-Michael A. Griffith, author of the chapbooks Bloodline (The Blue Nib), Exposed (Soma Publishing), and New Paths to Eden (Kelsay Books)

John Muth is poetry's Clark Kent. Within an anonymous college administrator who finds it "hard to be inconsequential," lives a new Ken Padgett who mines ordinary life to its core. His father's pill bottles line up on the kitchen table, "like a firing squad." The light above his desk is "a psychotic hornet trapped in a bucket." Escape beckons, but "elation like a running jump from a cliff only lasts a moment"-John soldiers on, a wry smile intact.

-Lew Maltby, author of Smiling Axes (Kelsay Books)