Life in the French Quarter of New Orleans is bar life, the quintessential stage setting for unfolding dramas, dark truths and chaos borne of excess. In Human Crutches, Damon Ferrell Marbut tells this story with remarkable generosity and skill, providing an inside study of local lifestyle in a great American city. Often humorous and sometimes vulgar, the poems are piercing, honest and layered with urban Southern affect as endearing as it is frightful. "Damon Marbut's poetry takes readers straight into the veins of French Quarter life, shows them every pitiful and chaotic beauty, and leaves them aching between dissonant states of joy and revulsion toward the bawdy cast of characters he meets along the way. He combines the unflinching madness of Beat poet storytelling with a resolute dedication to truth and terrifying purity. With every snapshot of human desolation and redemption, Marbut exposes the broken pieces inside us all." A. Meagan Davis Not since Eugene O'Neill have we met so many lost, disillusioned and downright funny souls in one single saloon. Damon Ferrell Marbut's Human Crutches is a veritable village of monologists certain to move you, piss you off, and leave you in laughter or sadness. Felice Picano