"From suburban streets to worldwide events, Jurkovic fights back with humor, ranging from dry to hilarious. Everything is political, and Jukovic doesn't care what you think. He'll keep writing dis-turbing notes and speak his mind. His new collection, mooncussers, provides entertaining lessons for us to emerge from the matrix that keeps our minds imprisoned."
- Patricia Carragon- Curator/Editor in-chief Brownstone Poets, Brooklyn, NY, author of Angel
Fire (Alien Buddha Press).
"mooncussers finds Jurkovic up on stage soloing all around and about the catastrophe, making big-hearted clevernudges to build another little machine of words, each offering the solace of company if not the surcease of sorrow."
-William Seaton, poet, translator, critic, and former member of San Francisco's Cloud House group
"Muscular, mordantly funny phrases that stick in the imagination like burs."
- Nina Shengold, Chronogram
"An old school, let 'er rip free spirit whose brisk voice does the poet's job: shaking up the reader's gray matter"
- Phil Wagner, Iconoclast
"He's the mad house jester whose jabs jolt and sting. As one of his poems puts it, "gravity gets us all," which is as serious as it gets. Enjoy this work, it is original and a pleasure to read."
-Guy Reed, poet, The Effort to Hold Light, Second Innocence
"In these poems, Jurkovic plays his signature dark jazz of anxiety, irony, empathy. But his ear is tuned as well to rich tones of contemplation that stop us in our tracks: "the air, hushed, flawless; the river a hug of diamonds." He plays the whole keyboard with love and skill."
- Irene O'Garden, Poet (Fulcrum: Selected Poems), Author (Glad To Be Human), Off- Broadway
playwright (Women On Fire)
"In mooncussers, Jurkovic takes his readers on a journey that like the jazz he loves so well, combines music, words, and rhythm. He invites us to enjoy the world he so eagerly inhabits, a world that we know begins with easy conversations, but deceives, twisting and hitting out: "It's like all the flagmen / came out of hiding / . . . So imagine this mob at rush hour, / closing in for the kill." And yet the poet sees beauty down every street: "The air hushed, flawless. / The river a hug of diamonds."
-Bertha Rogers, poet, What Want Brings: New & Selected Poems; founder, Bright Hill Press
& Literary Center, Treadwell, NY
"Funny, outrageous, courageous, Mike Jurkovic's poems take risks, as if every choice the poet makes were a left turn at a busy intersection at rush hour. Innovative, arresting, his poems provoke and tease."
-Dr. Lucia Cherciu, 2021 Dutchess County Poet Laureate, Professor Department of English SUNY / Dutchess
"A poet of intense precision, a collection of little daggers that head straight to the heart of things."
-John Pielmeier- Playwright (Agnes of God), Screenwriter, Novelist (Hook's Tale)
