Books by Rob Couteau

A selection of 101 poems by Rob Couteau. Over 40 of these poems were published in 15 different print and online journals between 1985 and 2020. "The new work might be quite dark, a recognition of the loss that time inevitably entails, yet he also pursued moments of high beauty ... There is a deep tenderness in these words, mingled with the sadness of age. If one goes back to the early poems one can find the tenderness there, too, as it is in his work as a case manager for the poor and homeless. There is much to admire in Couteau's oeuvre, but this tenderness stands out among so many things that make reading his work clearly an important experience." - Poet, critic, and literary historian Ed Foster, founder of Talisman House, Publishers, and Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. from his Introduction to Selected Poems.

Collected Couteau features an anthology the author's early writings and publications. It contains the only complete, unabridged versions of interviews with Ray Bradbury and Last Exit to Brooklyn author Hubert Selby. The 188-page trade-sized paperback also features an unabridged interview with Paul Bowles's biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, in which the latter discusses Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and the Beats. The collection includes an essay on Walt Whitman and numerous book reviews, including essays on Tea in the Harem, by Mehdi Charef; The Demon and The Room, by Hubert Selby; Libra, by Don DeLillo; Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The Mustache, by Emmanuel Carrère; A Literate Passion: The Letters of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, and a review of Allen Ginsberg's 1990 photography show in Paris. It also contains an in-depth review of Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul, by Claire Dunne; and Jung, My Mother and I. The Analytic Diaries of Catherine Rush Cabot, by Jane Cabot Reid.

Literary essays on Marion Morehouse, Hubert Selby, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac; interviews with Albert Hofmann (about LSD), Michael Korda (about T.E. Lawrence and Ulysses S. Grant), Jeffrey Jackson (about the Paris flood of 1910), Robert Roper (about Walt Whitman and Nabokov's Lolita, Justin Kaplan (about Mark Twain and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass), Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (about E.E. Cummings), James Dempsey (about Scofield Thayer).