Poets and the Fools Who Love Them blends autobiography with cultural commentary and meditates on creative writing as a cottage industry within humanities higher education. Celebrated poet and memoirist Richard Katrovas examines his picaresque early years with a criminal father, a beleaguered mother, and four siblings as state and federal authorities pursued the family across the highways of America. His freewheeling, wide-ranging essays consider, among other social constructs, the relation of crime and art, and the relation of both to the authority of the state, particularly in terms of race and class. Katrovas speaks candidly about how white privilege facilitated his father’s criminal career, as a lifestyle of larceny and used-car scams, perpetuated state to state, would have surely had different implications for a family of color. Drawing on his adulthood in academe, Katrovas’s memoir in essays chronicles a quest to locate surrogate fathers among older poets and other creative writers, and reflects upon the ways in which that search has affected his role as the father to three Czech American daughters. The book flows from the love of a poet for other poets, for the “community of poets,” one likened to a “gang of priests” and a “herd of bears.” Katrovas maintains that most lovers of poets are themselves poets, and those lovers of poets who are not themselves poets are saints. At its heart, Poets and the Fools Who Love Them contemplates, with care and unabashed honesty, the role of art and the artist in the madcap twenty-first century.
A provocative collection of personal and political essays by an American writer, Raising Girls in Bohemia chronicles the life of a father raising three perfectly bilingual, culturally bifurcated, Czech-American daughters. While tracing what fatherhood has taught him about the world, Katrovas delves into a range of intricately related yet far-flung subjects including fine dining, sexual epithets, gender identity, racism, poetry, and education, tracing the contours of his ignorance about all things. Through the course of these fine essays, Katrovas unveils what it means to be an American and to be a man, and especially what it means to be a father of three daughters, born in Prague, in what we can only hope is the twilight of patriarchy." --Amazon.
A modern romance for a fractured age, Richard Katrovas's first novel is a multi-layered mini epic that wholeheartedly lays its love on the line in the face of an abeyance of hope. Love for New Orleans; her secrets, her dark corners, her food. Love for life; its heroes, its villains, its also-rans. But above all, a love for Passion; its purity, its beauty, its inevitable consequences. Consequences felt by both twelve-year-old Willie Singer, growing up, and middle-aged Nathan Moore, growing older. Two inhabitants of the Crescent City whose paths collide and ricochet through the dying of a local poet and the ramifications of his death-bed opus - an epic poem, The Mystic Pig. For better and worse, their lives are forever altered. Mystic Pig beguiles. Written in evocative and poetic prose it effortlessly wraps the reader in the sensual, vibrant atmosphere of the French Quarter and delivers them right into the complex lives of its characters - warts and all. It's a novel about life and love, death and despair, acceptance, denial, murder, sex - and fine cuisine. Not necessarily in that order.
Stories on the American invasion of Czechoslovakia since the fall of Communism. The protagonists include capitalists on the make, people seeking their soul and beatniks looking for a place to hang out.
Poets and the Fools Who Love Them blends autobiography with cultural commentary and meditates on creative writing as a cottage industry within humanities higher education. Celebrated poet and memoirist Richard Katrovas examines his picaresque early years with a criminal father, a beleaguered mother, and four siblings as state and federal authorities pursued the family across the highways of America. His freewheeling, wide-ranging essays consider, among other social constructs, the relation of crime and art, and the relation of both to the authority of the state, particularly in terms of race and class. Katrovas speaks candidly about how white privilege facilitated his father’s criminal career, as a lifestyle of larceny and used-car scams, perpetuated state to state, would have surely had different implications for a family of color. Drawing on his adulthood in academe, Katrovas’s memoir in essays chronicles a quest to locate surrogate fathers among older poets and other creative writers, and reflects upon the ways in which that search has affected his role as the father to three Czech American daughters. The book flows from the love of a poet for other poets, for the “community of poets,” one likened to a “gang of priests” and a “herd of bears.” Katrovas maintains that most lovers of poets are themselves poets, and those lovers of poets who are not themselves poets are saints. At its heart, Poets and the Fools Who Love Them contemplates, with care and unabashed honesty, the role of art and the artist in the madcap twenty-first century.
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