Sandy McIntosh
FORTY-NINE WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH

Marsh Hawk Press
ISBN 10: 0-9792416-1-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-9792416-1-1
Paper, 86 pp., 8.8x5.9
$15

“McIntosh's imagination is so vivid that the primary response to [his poetry] is delight.” —American Book Review

In this new collection Sandy McIntosh ventures further into the realms of imaginative invention, returning with diverse arrangements of weird musical instruments and catalogs of improbable events. In a seemingly simple postmodern gesture, McIntosh makes what in most people’s hands would-be gimmicks into writing that is truly heartfelt, genuine and intriguingly strange. A number of writers and poets might come to mind when reading Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death as well as McIntosh’s earlier work—Borges, Auster, Collins—but no one else has so amusingly plumbed our unconscious and the melding of dream and “reality” as has McIntosh; his forays into experience are painful at times, hilariously bizarre, always poignant as well as provocative, and unique in their formal qualities. His is a Möbius strip world in which we become aware of our primal fears and wishes through the oddnesses of an everyday consciousness tinged with ironic goofiness.
Sandy McIntosh’s gift of exploring the “what if” moments of life is most evident in his new vivacious collection Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways To Escape Death. McIntosh spins a tantalizing web of tales—unlikely encounters with the famous; musical instruments invented not to be easily played, but rather to be beautiful objects themselves; and mega-lists, one of which is the sublime title poem. Constantly inventive, his poems are meta in their metamorphosis—one prose poem even becomes a review of his last book. He mythologizes terrorist threats and re-imagines The Man of Steel. His poems are indeed reminiscent of Superman, zooming into Metropolis to scoop up Poetry and save it from the villains, Boredom and Pretense. —Denise Duhamel

Sandy McINTOSH’s collections of poetry include The After Death History of My Mother, Between Earth and Sky (Marsh Hawk Press), Endless Staircase (Street Press), Earth Works (Long Island University), Which Way to the Egress? (Garfield Publishers), and two chapbooks: Obsessional (Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry) and Monsters of the Antipodes (Survivors Manual Books). His prose includes Firing Back, with Jodie-Beth Galos (John Wiley & Sons), From A Chinese Kitchen (American Cooking Guild), and The Poets In the Poets-In-The-Schools (Minnesota Center for Social Research, University of Minnesota. His poetry and essays have been published in The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal, American Book Review, and elsewhere. His original poetry in a film script won the Silver Medal in the Film Festival of the Americas.
POETRY