Unusual Woods

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“Gene Tanta's Unusual Woods is at once shocking, lively, and oddly nurturing, imprinted as it is with the down-home authority of language's deep hands.”

—Annie Finch

“The poems in Unusual Woods are energetic little bulletins from the front.”

—John L. Koethe

History with its betrayals lurks behind Gene Tanta, lends his writing wisdom and gravity, but he’s also playful and wickedly humorous. Infused with a deft surrealism, these subtle yet startling poems are like parables, brief films, elegant dreams, baffling skirmishes or erotic near misses. They demand and reward repeated readings.

—Linh Dinh

Gene Tanta’s Unusual Woods is just that, a journey through the dark forest of the poet’s mind. Tanta’s poems are at once playful and haunting, turning the everyday into the grotesque, the carnivalesque, the beautiful. His is a world in which, “sometimes the squeaky wheel / gets the hammer.” A speaker in one of Tanta’s poems says, “I too want to fully conjugate the human heart.” In Unusual Woods, in Tanta’s unique way, a way simultaneously foreboding and alluring, he already has.

—Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time

In the 50 demi-sonnets that make up Unusual Woods, as original a debut collection as I've ever read, Gene Tanta asks us to enter history in unusual ways: through the noose of a joke, the music of assassins, the slippery holes in the sidewalk of logic. This remarkable sequence reminds me that there is no music more beautiful and terrifying than an open mouth, breathing, singing, dreaming. How Tanta, a child of Romania and Chicago, became heir to so many rich traditions is our pleasure to discover as we chart the terrain of an important new voice in poetry.

— Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Gene Tanta’s “Unusual Woods” should come with a warning label: Handle With Care. Contents Extremely Volatile. Each thirteen-line poem is a powder keg taking on politics, history, and language itself. While in search for the “myth or origins”, Tanta experiments with sounds and striking, original images, in turn creating new worlds that are entirely his own. Tanta writes in the surrealist tradition but he is no follower. This is poetry as it should be—irreverent, visionary, breaking expectations.

—Andrei Guruianu

“Where are we, in Gene Tanta’s Unusual Woods? We’re where Charles Simic would live, if he’d been born a few decades later, under the signs of ellipsis and disjunction. These are woods with at least two borders running through them. The first of them divides the surreal anecdote from the elliptical meditation, and along this border we find deformed aphorisms, slippery allegories, cryptic personifications, and parables bent out of shape and away from meaning. This is a zone filled with almost-expressive artifacts like faceless dolls and faded photos. The second border runs between Tanta’s Romanian past and his American present. Both Eastern Europe and the United States appear in fragments of iconic figures: Stalin, fortune-tellers, gypsies, elders with samovars, spies, and Paul Celan; or Black Hawk Indians, Gulf War veterans, teenagers dancing the funky chicken, and Ernest Hemingway. No one but Tanta lives at these exact poetic co-ordinates. You’d be wrong not to visit.