Praise for Déjà Vu Diner

Suffused with an austere blue light, the poems of Leonard Gontarek’s Déjà Vu Diner are both musical and precise.
—Susan Stewart

Gontarek’s lyricism—his aphoristic reticence—is unique in its precision, its refusal to use emotion carelessly, its eerie fragmentation. How almost not to say what must be said is the structural heart of these poems that express the ordinary surreal experience of our lives, and embody the tradition of Beckett’s “Every word is a stain on silence and nothingness.” Gontarek makes this dangerous territory his own—“I am a crazy man in a bathrobe,” he says as he meticulously sings his hypnotic songs.
—Stephen Berg