Poetry. Love, loss, and our loopy ways of coping with both are the focus of this jazzy first collection. Fritz Ward approaches the time-honored topics of the breakup and romatic disappointment with the desire to dig beyond lust, ego, regret, and anger, to truths that shape our way of seeing not just the Other but the Self, not to mention the world in which we go on living.

With a really remarkable ear for the jazz of English and an equally remarkable eye for the image, Fritz Ward's sexy TSUNAMI DIORAMA is a serious pleasure. On second thought, 'pleasure' is a tame word for the vivid, syncopated, and urgent pace of this wildly imagined and written book. --Lynn Emanuel

In the opening poem of Fritz Ward's superb debut, he writes, 'I've set this narrative to burn down your front door.' And burn it down he does. The joys of love, of marriage, of sex turn out to be--at the hands of Ward's adept craftsmanship--omens of fear, of depravity, of existential terror. When you enter his poems, he blindfolds you and spins you around, and the room you thought you were in turns out to be anything but what you expected. And did I mention his delightfully impish fearlessness? If you like your verse spiked with a good dose of absinthe, you will love TSUNAMI DIORAMA. --Henry Israeli

In TSUNAMI DIORAMA, Fritz Ward has succeeded in writing us postcards -front and back-missives and letters teeming with disturbances, romance, the neurosis that is romance, and the romance of the Whitmanian multitudes found in oneself and others. I so adore his linguistic high jinks, his lyricism, and his heart, which is, in this tsunami of verse, his diorama of the living and the dead, what gives these poems their salt and their scale. --Kathy Fagan