Sixty new poems (2001-2006) ranging from evocations of childhood to meditations on mortality, journalistic snapshots to intimate love lyrics, reflections on the pointlessness of existence to celebrations of the pleasures of friendship and the delights of sensory perception, moving geographically from California to Spain and back again, with stops in Chicago, New York City and elsewhere, a philosophical journey in musical time.
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“Stephen Kessler gives poetic form to those ‘endangered deities’ threatened by disappearance in the oblivion of the rapid California globalized Now. A love poet of sensitive memory, he constructs his poems as bastions of feeling amid crumbling values and collapsing affirmations.” —Jack Hirschman

“Stephen Kessler gives us what readers desperately want: the experience of a whole life lived. Dense, reflective, and unflinching, Tell It to the Rabbis takes marvelous risks with language and with memory.” —D. J. Waldie

“Kessler has mapped the emotional expanses determined by the harsh borders of longing and loss, sexual attraction and sexual release, mystical union and mystical dissolve, and his poems—by turns tender, ironic, furious, and wry—pulse with the soulful syncopation of the heart.” —Gary Young

“The work collected here may focus on the kinds of questions all of us have—inquiries about love and sex and longing and loss. But Kessler brings to them an extraordinary sensitivity, a gift for acute observation, and an astonishing talent for making ordinary words perform more extraordinary tricks than a troupe of Chinese acrobats.” —North Bay Bohemian

“These soul-deep, introspective songs by Stephen Kessler wax strongly of the philosophical, the nostalgic, and an acceptance of life’s complexities tinged with a quiet rage—this book is an ‘alchemical’ work of passion.” —Wanda Coleman

“No one is better at delineating our love-hate relation to modern life and urban dissonance than Stephen Kessler. He catches with perfect precision the mad contradictions we embrace every day.” —Carolyn Kizer

“Kessler, a language rogue, a bard of solitude and singer for a greater harmony, delivers the breakdown, the soulmix of a civilization on the edge, a word runner cutting through the Phenomena into the grave pleasures of the Real.” —Juan Felipe Herrera

“On the question of roots and influences, the poems…provide a good deal of insight. Ginsberg, William Blake, Henry Miller, Julio Cortázar, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Rexroth and Federico García Lorca are all invoked. Not a bad list to be associated with. Add maybe Bob Dylan and Charles Bukowski and you’ll have a fair idea of where Kessler is coming from.” —Anderson Valley Advertiser

“Kessler’s poems are meticulously crafted gems of wit, style and passion. His delight in expressing complex emotions with just the right turn of phrase, with a former infielder’s nonchalant flick of the wrist’s lethal double play, is palpable and irresistible.” —Monterey County Weekly

“Stephen Kessler’s ‘In the Late Sun’ [from Living Expenses] has an almost baroque richness of images, the kind of richness that might at first glance seem excessive—but slowly, intently read, each, in turn, work (are vivid) and—what is essential—accumulate not randomly or by continuing separateness but as a coherent whole in which they turn out to have been essential. The process, I feel, is akin to music—a piece of orchestral music in which many instruments, many rhythms, keys, tones, harmonies, motifs, partake, contributing to a whole. Also it is a poem in which is manifested the paradox of ‘happiness piercing the breast’ at any odd moment (in this case ‘pissing at dusk in fresh air’) in the midst of, despite, every surrounding negative. To me that’s at the very core of what living is all about.” —Denise Levertov, The American Poetry Review

Limited edition letterpress chapbook hand-set by the author and printed in France by Romilly Waite at Braad Press. Eleven lyric poems, written mostly in Spain in 1976, that form a section of the larger, still unpublished book Maps to the Stars Homes.

Limited edition letterpress chapbook hand-set and printed by Gary Young in Santa Cruz. A long poem with strong Los Angeles themes, also a section of Maps to the Stars Homes.

Limited edition chapbook. A comic “Elegy Written in an Orange County Amusement Park” that borrows from and parodies various English poets from Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton to Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.

“Over the years most of us have come to take for granted George Hitchcock’s wide-ranging contribution to contemporary poetry. Stephen Kessler’s Nostalgia of the Fortuneteller is no exception. Kessler speaks with an authenticity that is rare among younger poets, and speaks in a variety of styles….While maintaining an absolute control over diction, Kessler lets the poem take a clearly organic form, the images vividly defined, and the poems full of the sounds of graceful ordinary speech….This music was composed by a finely tuned ear.” —Sam Hamill, Small Press Review

“The collection’s telling ingredient is its economy of language, although the poems are anything but drab. In fact, Kessler dwells often in zones of anguish and madness, but keeps his imagery lucid and free of excess descriptive baggage….Not to be neglected is the poet’s sense of humor, which is pervasive and honed to a fine ironic edge….Nostalgia of the Fortuneteller rewards close reading. Kessler’s rhythms are usually appropriate and always smooth. His is a resourceful intelligence which complements well the richness of his imagination and the care with which he chooses his words.” —Sundaz! (Santa Cruz)