Description

Night Shift
Stories by Ron Kolm
“Ron Kolm’s Night Shift stands alongside other wage-slave masterpieces like Charles Bukowski’s Factotum and Harvey Pecar’s American Splendor. Winking and grinning in the face of punch-clock death, Kolm finds a way to somehow stay alive and even to eventually triumph. One senses in these moving and sometimes hilarious little vignettes that Kolm wrote them in flagrante dilecto; a gypsy moth blue collar poet-scholar recording his emergence from sooty cocoon to winging oracle of the smokestacks, junkyards, tenements and roads of the national creep-scape.’’
— Alan Kaufman, author of Drunken Angel; editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature

“Kolm has always been a true NYC poet, with a sensitive urbanity and absurdist humor that barely looks both ways as taxis filled with rich yupsters swerve around downwardly mobile moppets with new wave beards. His is a voice that realizes the foreverness of beat vision. Where we all come together to love the noise of the great metropolis we are lucky to have this guy in the room.”
— Thurston Moore, author of Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture and Stereo Sanctity -– Lyrics & Poems

“Ron Kolm is an American original and Night Shift is a testament to a life lived in the margins — which is where the real action has always been. Wise, ribald, human, unexpectedly soulful, these stories have the grit and rhythm of real live as filtered through a sensibility finely tuned to the absurd and comic.’’
— Michael Lindgren reviews for the Brooklyn Rail, L Magazine and Rain Taxi

Paperback, 100pp. 5.5×8 inches, illustrations