Lee Rossi Reviews Leonard Gontarek’s Ain’t No Angel Gonna Greet Me

A generous and perceptive review of Leonard Gontarek’s Ain’t No Angel Gonna Greet Me has just appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, written by poet and critic Lee Rossi. Rossi’s reading offers both an entry point into Gontarek’s ninth book and a thoughtful meditation on the tensions, formal, emotional, philosophical, that animate its more than 240 pages.

Rossi opens by preparing the reader for a mixed emotional register: humor, melancholy, and moments of quiet ache. This tonal range, he suggests, is central to Gontarek’s project. The book resists easy categorization, and Rossi smartly frames this resistance by beginning his discussion at the end of the volume, with an interview between Gontarek and poet Jan Starkey. The conversation’s halting syntax, repetition, and circular questioning immediately raise a central issue: is Gontarek a Language poet or a narrative poet? Rossi’s answer, drawn from the evidence of the book itself, is an emphatic “yes.”

The review carefully walks readers through the book’s tripartite structure: Carry Me Home, Photo of the Poet Holding His Father at Age 3, and the brief concluding section, Fakepath. Rossi reads this structure musically, likening the final, six-page section to a coda following two larger movements. This musical analogy is reinforced by Gontarek’s own remarks about drumming and by his shared admiration for Walter Pater’s claim that all art aspires to the condition of music.

Throughout the review, Rossi attends closely to Gontarek’s stylistic consistencies: the epigrammatic wit, the jokester’s voice, the Buddhist and haiku-inflected compression, and the ongoing negotiation between sincerity and irony. In Carry Me Home, Rossi sees a sequence of short, often haiku-like poems that circle themes of shame, insecurity, loss, and betrayal. He notes how obsessive imagery recurs dreamlike, even surreal, while moments of emotional clarity arrive suddenly and cut deep. The section’s emotional arc, Rossi argues, moves from acute pain toward numbness, ending not in consolation but in a dark, sardonic shrug.

The second section, Photo of the Poet Holding His Father at Age 3, strikes Rossi as longer, looser, and frequently funnier. Here, Gontarek’s self-deprecating humor and skepticism toward literary convention come to the fore. Rossi highlights the poet’s refusal to settle into easy lyric pleasure, rhyme is teased but avoided, expectations are raised only to be undercut. Yet this resistance is not mere contrarianism; Rossi frames it as the hard-earned posture of a poet who has lived through, and survived, the battles over language, meaning, and artistic legitimacy.

One of the review’s strengths is its attention to Gontarek’s internal dialogue and tonal shifts. Rossi finds echoes of Berryman, imagism mingling with surrealism, tenderness brushing up against nihilism. Freedom, Rossi suggests, emerges not from resolution but from restlessness, from Gontarek’s refusal to “imitate himself” and his continued commitment to making it new, even after eight previous books.

Rossi closes by pointing toward moments where the poems gesture beyond the self, particularly through nature and Buddhist-inflected imagery. In these passages, the book offers not answers but a way of being: drifting, attentive, adorned with fleeting beauty. Rossi’s final image, of a boat decorated with orchids, captures the review’s overall generosity. It frames Ain’t No Angel Gonna Greet Me as a book that accepts impermanence, doubt, and contradiction, while still insisting on the possibility of grace.

Lee Rossi’s review is both a close reading and an invitation, welcoming readers into a book that is as formally adventurous as it is emotionally candid. Leonard Gontarek’s Ain’t No Angel Gonna Greet Me, published by BlazeVOX [books], emerges here as a work that listens deeply to its own music, and trusts readers to listen along.

Read the whole review here:
https://thepedestalmagazine.com/leonard-gontareks-aint-no-angel-gonna-greet-me-reviewed-by-lee-rossi/

Buy Leonard Gontarek’s Ain’t No Angel Gonna Greet Me here