Broken Color By Dean Kostos
"Dean Kostos’s new collection of poems, Broken Color, is absolutely amazing! The book is broken down into five parts, and the title of each is a meaningful color. The first section deals with his youth and its strange reality. Shot through with sadness, his upbringing kicks in immediately. From “Us-ward” he states, “I wade in boyhood’s creek. / Currents reverse.” Later, Kostos writes, “letter / never sent to childhood’s house. / That building is now a scar.” Several times Dean mentions Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I would say that this painting sums up Kostos’s style perfectly: an underlying realism drenched with a surrealist patina. He also lists a number of artists, including one of my favorites, J. M. W. Turner, but the artist whose work came to mind after I finished this book was Hieronymus Bosch. Totally recommended."
—Ron Kolm, contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine and author of Night Shift
"Dean Kostos’s new collection of poems, Broken Color, is absolutely amazing! The book is broken down into five parts, and the title of each is a meaningful color. The first section deals with his youth and its strange reality. Shot through with sadness, his upbringing kicks in immediately. From “Us-ward” he states, “I wade in boyhood’s creek. / Currents reverse.” Later, Kostos writes, “letter / never sent to childhood’s house. / That building is now a scar.” Several times Dean mentions Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I would say that this painting sums up Kostos’s style perfectly: an underlying realism drenched with a surrealist patina. He also lists a number of artists, including one of my favorites, J. M. W. Turner, but the artist whose work came to mind after I finished this book was Hieronymus Bosch. Totally recommended."
—Ron Kolm, contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine and author of Night Shift
"Dean Kostos’s new collection of poems, Broken Color, is absolutely amazing! The book is broken down into five parts, and the title of each is a meaningful color. The first section deals with his youth and its strange reality. Shot through with sadness, his upbringing kicks in immediately. From “Us-ward” he states, “I wade in boyhood’s creek. / Currents reverse.” Later, Kostos writes, “letter / never sent to childhood’s house. / That building is now a scar.” Several times Dean mentions Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I would say that this painting sums up Kostos’s style perfectly: an underlying realism drenched with a surrealist patina. He also lists a number of artists, including one of my favorites, J. M. W. Turner, but the artist whose work came to mind after I finished this book was Hieronymus Bosch. Totally recommended."
—Ron Kolm, contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine and author of Night Shift