Books by Philip Kobylarz

Surgery is not simply a medical procedure. Surgery can also be a dissection - when absent of an intent to treat and correct, the procedure becomes a hungry curiosity to examine and investigate. At its purest, a dissection intricately probes to behold the internal. Kobylarz practices this surgery of delicate incisions in his mélange. The essence of a miscellany of diverse things is not merely to catalog a wunderkammer of everyday objects, but moreover to hold up a double mirror: one to reveal the interior lives of objects, and another to reflect the depths of their creators and owners. Kobylarz's poetry may initially elevate the mundane, but its deepest design is to ask what the human possession divulges about the human being. The quotidian isn't only ecstatic; the quotidian is a book of revelations.With nods to Flaubert's Le Dictionnaire des Idées Recues and Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, Kobylarz moves beyond a contained lexicon to a flung-open cabinet of curiosities. Encyclopedic in its compilation (more than 400 entries in this dictionary volume), miscellany avoids the static inventory list of a storehouse to embody the world as theatre. There are no museum exhibits, with objects isolated and preserved in glass cases. Instead, Kobylarz places spotlights on the minute, under-appreciated, and even unloved. He regards common objects as pearls within the world of an oyster, but never forgets their genesis of grit and irritant. In these poems, wonder and oddity are fused as sure as Bowie lived.

"e;These short excursions into the many Frances Philip Kobylarz knows and loves are complete in themselves and add up to one traveler's intelligent, visceral, immediate appreciation of French culture. A tonic getaway for the weary and jaded, this is both a cheap vacation, and a rich one. I loved it. 'All Roads Lead from Massilia' is engrossing and palpable."e; ~ Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of 'The Mexican Man in His Backyard, Stories & Essays'

Philip Kobylarz's poems, essays, and short stories appear in such journals as The Iowa Review, Paris Review, and Massachusetts Review. Currently he is engaged in the study of how to be/not be.Rues presents often fascinating views of how the mind might build analogues for the way disparate situations come to constitute a place. The poems build haphazard acts of attention into quasi-surreal urban extensions of haiku. The primary effect is our involvement in intricate fields of feeling-for what gathers the elements together and for our own capacities of surprise that we come to care about that gathering. -Charles AltieriThe tender little meditations that compose Rues are windows onto a landscape, not precisely real but not not real either. "All views are interiors," Kobylarz reminds us, nonetheless presenting a spectacle of gorgeously observed worldly wonders. From the "hoodoos of shit" dogs leave on the street to the "slow burning aureoles" of women smoking in the "almost nude," the real, the imagined and the surreal gracefully entangle. Even so, over all these poems, a patina of ruefulness presides: a regret, a longing: the world caught in the act of vanishing. -Karen Brennan, Author of The Real Enough WorldAcuity and duration of attention can indeed create a world, and that is exactly what Philip Kobylarz has accomplished with Rues. (The pun on rues is perfectly in keeping with the mischief of poetry and with the regret attendant upon all loving and urgent attention.) Every one of these poems is a world found and lost, and yet the loss is somehow always a glory, a radiance. To read this book is to travel widely and deeply. Go! -Donald RevellPhilip Kobylarz's epigrammatic poems lead us into silences. They also remind us that poetry is a tribute to Mystery. These lucid moments found in concrete and small, if not insignificant object and places, point to quiet revelations of ordinary things. By elevating ordinary moments to the level of the Silence, Kobylarz validates every small and minute detail of existence. -Ewa Chrusciel

Philip Kobylarz is an itinerant teacher of the language arts and writer of fiction, poetry, book reviews, and essays. He has worked as a journalist, a film critic, a veterinarian's assistant, a deliverer of furniture, and an ascetic. He currently teaches at Santa Clara University, Notre Dame de Namur, and Menlo College. His work appears in such publications as Paris Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry series, Massachusetts Review, and Lalitamba. His first book, Zen-inspired poems concerning life in the south of France, is entitled rues. He lives ever so temporarily in the east bay of San Francisco. ~~~ You don't know who the alien is, you or the other guy, or girl, or possibly both. Not that that makes you compañeros; so we learn in these wry stories, told with the air of a disabused Mediterranean wanderer run aground, occasionally, in the American west. From Kobylarz, both poet and storyteller, let there be more. -David Hamilton author of Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm, Ossabaw, Hard Choices: An "Iowa Review" Reader ~~~These stories are the product of a first-rate talent that doesn't let the reader down, intellectually, artistically, or viscerally: no boring, standard literary tripe here, but a healthy serving of smart, readable, sophisticated stories that remind us of the age we live in, of the everyday grotesquerie we're attempting to beat in any way we can-with art that matters and helps us to get by. Philip Kobylarz is really, really good. Turn on to him and spread the word. -Stephen D. Gutierrez, author of The Mexican in His Backyard ~~~And NOW-Nowhere 21st Century America-teeming with rivers and rooms, t.v. icons of glamour and war, mysteries of the visitor, the stay-at-homes, the all-nights, and anything but and including the plain as day. We hear it all with the one voice that impels us to wake-up, to embrace both the ordinary and the uncanny figures who dwell outside and inside of ourselves. These stories of leaving do happily confound the reader's arrival at every turn, and serve to confirm us in our belief we are all living the lives of the innocent and inescapably, that of the experienced. -Jeannine Savard author of Accounted For, My Hand Upon Your Name, Trumpeter, Snow Water Cove