STRAY DOG
REVIEW
Competition and sport have provided motifs for human cultural endeavors and have been the expression of such endeavors—Paul Polansky directly touches on these motifs in an accessible style that offers a poetic account of one's aversion to the brutality of violence.
Tales of street fighters and boxers usually find refuge in reportages and manly narratives. Polansky has set such experience to poetry, quite clearly in the spirit of Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Bukowski. After all, these brawlers are the very ones who defend their right to life, and it is precisely life that Polansky discusses in his unpolished narrative verse. The fierce struggle for a place in the sun is the fabric for these boxer's stories, which present the topography of a lonely masculine soul in conditions of utter violence and the repugnance this violence in turn produces. In Stray Dog Paul Polansky once again opens the boxer's locker room and ring: the chamber of poetry. [Vit Kremlicka]
PAUL POLANSKY
