Author Description

Poetry. "To read MY SECRET WARS OF 1984 is to ride an old wooden rollercoaster through a spacious gallery of stained-glass windows, all their colorful shards having been stolen, shattered, then chewed into shape: what we have here are gorgeous and wise assemblages of sharp, scavenged graffiti. Ricocheting from Pac-Man to Topeka to institutional structures to AIDS awareness to Reagan, Dennis Etzel, Jr. masters the skills of fragmentation and disharmony without losing one bit of torque. Sharpen your political acumen on this poetry-memoir of the highest order—and discover much pleasure in the process."—Amy King, author of The Missing Museum "The sentence inscribes a trauma, bumps over a secret, and accretes toward continuance, which is life. In MY SECRET WARS OF 1984, Dennis Etzel, Jr. constructs little sentence survival packets, brimming with Reaganite Cold War fear and the inescapable ''I am'' of a teenage boy in a threatening world. Our Superhero of Fragility threads these lines with tenderness, wit, and humor, and comes out the other side more whole than before."—Allison Cobb, author of GREEN-WOOD "The world of 1984 has a deft tenacity in the hands of Dennis Etzel, Jr. This book blends the personal to the greater political as only the best possible memoir can do. We are all in this world together and the strangest things occur, sometimes when other strange things occur, and I thank Mr. Etzel for his brilliant, sharp reminder."—CAConrad, author of ECODEVIANCE "Some years brand our history: 1861, 1968, 2001; others are best known as fictions, like 1984, made famous by George Orwell in the real year of 1949. The actual 1984 featured Ronald Reagan''s race against Walter Mondale, the discovery of the AIDS virus, dead U.S. Marines in Lebanon, and Prince''s Purple Rain album. It was an era in which popular culture and foreign policy came together in Star Wars. Dennis Etzel, Jr., then a teen-ager, played a part in that history. His mother came ou