This Is Not a Skyscraper - by Dean Kostos (Paperback)

About the Book

"This Is Not a Skyscraper examines New York City through a surrealist lens. Like the title of Magritte's painting, "This is not a pipe," these poems question perceptions of the metropolis. While NYC entices talents that swarm its stages, museums, runways, and readings, throngs of outsiders live on the city's margins, silenced. Among the grotesqueries of corruption, an African immigrant is killed by police in a case of mistaken identity. His disembodied voice introduces the book. Many of these poems attempt to speak for the "others" existing on the peripheral, whose perspectives have been abandoned"--

Book Synopsis

This Is Not a Skyscraper examines New York City through a surrealist lens. Like the title of Magritte's painting, "This is not a pipe," these poems question perceptions of the metropolis. While NYC entices talents that swarm its stages, museums, runways, and readings, throngs of outsiders live on the city's margins, silenced. Among the grotesqueries of corruption, an African immigrant is killed by police in a case of mistaken identity. His disembodied voice introduces the book. Many of these poems attempt to speak for the "others" existing on the peripheral, whose perspectives have been abandoned.

Review Quotes

Most of his poems are also lyrical, with striking imagery. Here is a poignant description of a Coney Island sideshow performer in the beginning lines of "Scorpion Cowboy," from This is Not a Skyscraper.

How does he tend to the body's needs? Clunk! His pincers thud like sand-filled shoes. Making his mother's body bleed

when he was a boy, he swore he'd mask his thalidomide shame like a bruise.

-Sharon Olinka

About the Author

Dean Kostos's collections include Rivering, Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma (taught at Duke University), and Celestial Rust. He edited Mama's Boy and Pomegranate Seeds. His work has appeared in leading journals: Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, and on Oxygen.com. Having taught at Wesleyan, The Gallatin School, and The City University of New York, he also wrote a libretto for Voices of Ascension, and his poem, "Subway Silk," was translated into a short film by Jill Clark.