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RMA
Memoir by John Yamrus 56 pages $10 plus shipping ISBN: 978-1-926860-65-7 Epic Rites Press, January 2019 In RMA, his follow-up to his popular memoir, MEMORY LANE, John Yamrus returns to the streets and scenes and people of the town where he grew up. The book is not only informative as to how the mature poet was shaped and formed, but also evocative of a time and place now long gone and nearly forgotten. RMA.
RMA is available on Amazon now!
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Memory Lane
Memoir by John Yamrus 50 pages $10 plus shipping ISBN: 978-1-926860-61-9 Epic Rites Press, January, 2018 After nearly 50 years as a highly acclaimed and admired poet, John Yamrus takes a rare foray into prose with MEMORY LANE, his newest book...a look back at his childhood, growing up in a Pennsylvania coal mining community in the late 1950's. Yamrus focuses his legendary wit, insight, talent and humor on the people, places and things that went into making him the writer he is today. No ordinary memoir, MEMORY LANE unforgettably adds brilliant touches of color to the fading sepia tones of a time gone by.
Memory Lane is available on Amazon now!
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Art by Mish
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This beautifully written memoir is also a meditation and consideration of the power of memory to evoke and its tendency to falsify, or lie. The unreliability of memory is as much subject as the life the memoir describes--and what a life! At a distance of sixty years Yamrus manages, through language, to convey the sense of incredulity and innocence felt by a child growing up poor in a Pennsylvania coal-town in America in the 1950's. In a voice beguiling, and disarming, and reminiscent in its authentic-sounding originality to that of William Saroyan's, Yamrus admits to his inadequacy to recreate, on paper, a childhood, and his capacity to dis-remember, yet plunges ahead, making us, the readers, sort of co-conspirators along the way... This is a tribute to the writing. This memoir-in-the-making, is high art. The details Yamrus chooses--his Uncle's missing "pointer finger," his grandmother's "clunky black shoes...with block heels," the way his father wore a baseball cap "slung off to the side," give verisimilitude, which, coupled with the stylish, and no doubt hard-earned craft of the prose, make "Memory Lane" memorable indeed. |
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“The poetry of John Yamrus demands more attention. There is real blood in this man’s work.” “Two major qualities prevail in Yamrus’ recent work: economy and punch.” “John Yamrus is a reader’s writer whose poems are built from one honest line after another.” |
“Terse profundity would be the phrase I would use were someone to pin me down and force me to describe the work of John Yamrus. This is poetry of short lines and simple wisdom, there is a touch of the Far East about the structure and minimalist philosophy that underpins them; there is no surreal baroque parade of language, these are sticks arranged subtly against a white wall.” “John Yamrus remains one of my favorite authors. I can sit down and read one of his books start to finish—and along the way, laugh at his jokes, marvel at his wit, and every now and then a golden brick of enlightenment drops on my head.” “John Yamrus, as a poet, is like an expert skeet shooter that hits the clay pigeon no matter what the speed, angle or trajectory; in poem after poem, his sharp mind nails its target every time.” “John Yamrus seamlessly surfs the boundary between humour and despair.” |
Art by Mish
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“John Yamrus writes the kind of poetry that punches right through to the core of his reader’s hearts.
He is a poet who needs no validation from the literary or academic establishment.”
—Devin McGuire
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