Coffee Poems is a chapbook collection of sixteen poems that embraces coffee in a wide variety of application, though hardly exhaustive. This includes the origin of coffee, traditions, obsessions or rituals, common associations (and uncommon ones), a bit of science, mixology, metaphor, and others. The collection also presents a variety of forms in addition to the standard lineated free verse poems: prose poems, personal essay/didactic poem, Duplex Sonnet in prose poem format, Erasure poem (presented two ways), Fibonacci sequences poem, a poem whose genesis is from the "opposites game," and a Golden Shovel with a Cento epigram. Some poems have a backstory below the text.
Whether you like your coffee swirled with a bit of cream or black and bitter, you will relish the offerings in this latest book brewed by John C. Mannone. From the stoops of the Columbian mountains, where the original Juan Valdez grew his coffee beans, to the monks of Ethiopia who, having been informed of the antics of goats that ate the coffee berry, then imbibed a liquid from those same berries and hence were able to remain awake through the long evening prayers, and on through history to the author's own cup steaming before him, the face of his long dead father looking back upon him from the "fluid folds of the dark pool," there is much to savor and to learn in this small collection. The poems are testaments to the magic and mysticism of the drink from a poet with his "fingers wrapping the . . . cup / as something holy." Mannone brings a lifetime of refining his palette and honing his use of language to produce a delightful collection of 16 poems, an apt bit of reading while you drink your first morning cup, or your final afternoon cup, of the "essential elixir."
-Connie Jordan Green, author of Nameless as the Minnows
Such an excellent variety of poems serving as brews of choice that bring out the best of each one for the discriminating connoisseur! Who among us coffee drinkers hasn't known moments of quiet worship in a layered awakening? Reading this collection is an education both in poetic forms and the magic power of the coffee bean. I guarantee you'll savor it as a keeper on your bookshelf.
-Marge Simon, Grand Master poet, SF Poetry Association, and co-author of Cast from Darkness
