Omerta: Selected Poems by Les Gottesman gathers a selection of his poems from 2006 to 2019 as well as earlier works from the 1960s and 70s. Les Gottesman''s poems straddle the New York School and San Francisco Beat literary scenes with his own uniquely comic, surrealist sensibility. He resumed his career as poet and editor in the early 2000s, after he devoted decades as an educator and radical political activist. As poet and playwright Genny Lim explains in the Preface, "Les Gottesman''s willful deconstruction of literary conventions through his terse metric schemes, find their own dissonant logic and stream of consciousness in surprising accord, if read aloud, to the discordant rhythms and riffs of the best boppers and new music innovators of our time, like Bird, Dizzy, Hawk, Ornette or Cage." Novelist and poet Paul Auster finds in the poems "surprise after surprise, delivered with wit and masterful timing." Critic Bruce F. Kawin calls his poems "funny and personal. Sharp and obscure. His tightly arranged sounds and vivid words take you somewhere but don''t tell you where it is. He''s a grave jester with a speeding mind and a montage artist''s control of tone." The last period of poetic ferment by this "grave jester" lasted until his death in 2019. Omerta gathers a selection of all of his poems, those 2006 to 2019 as well as earlier works from the 1960s and 70s. Omerta: Selected Poems by Les Gottesman includes the preface by Genny Lim, essays by the three editors, Bill Crossman, Hilton Obenzinger, and Alan Senauke, and images of book covers by acclaimed artist Jesse Gottesman.
