Hey, I’m Tim Barnes, you are the genre, and in this episode I’m chatting with writer Andrew E. Colarusso. I interviewed him in text form a few years back in the newsletter, but now he joins me in audioland to discuss his latest collection of poetry PETTYGOD. The collection is irrepressible, holy, profane, tender, hilarious, "too hot to touch."

Our two creative paths intersect in strange ways. For instance, another text interview of mine with DuVay Knox influenced one of the poems in PETTYGOD. Which is why I should warn you: some explicit words are said in this episode!

Andrew owns and operates Taylor & Co., an independent bookstore in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. I worked there for a while as the “Monday guy” and can attest that it’s a uniquely inviting space filled with an eclectic roster characters popping in each day.

As risk of being petty, Andrew also flips the script and interviews ME about my scripted audio series JUDGE TRAVIS.

I hope you get to check out both of our projects.

-Tim

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“Andrew E. Colarusso’s newest is a sharp-edged erotic, politically unflinching poetry collection where syntax is shattered to reveal deeper ancestral reckoning. Like Kamau Brathwaite, Colarusso understands the page as a score to conjure rebellion, bend grammar, break form, and tune the line to the frequency of diaspora, confessional grief, and spiritual survival. His language pulses with both prophecy and protest, as seen in poems like ‘The Pussy Detective,’ which blends pulp poetics, satire and sovereignty, and refuses the sanitized gaze of empire while regarding the vernacular as sacred terrain. In ‘Who Hath Known the Mind of God,’ the writer reckons despair and the brutal intimacy of city life as it unfolds into a fever dream of love and despair. Across his work, interiority becomes a site of disruption, therefore, Pettygod be a living archive for the haunted and the holy. Colarusso scribes like fire, raising sacred spaces from ash, where fracture and ruin form the raw scaffolding of a resilient desire to be free.”—Mahogany L. Browne

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