These Many Cold Winters of the Heart is dancing splinters of Life, and that inevitable experience of Death that our common humanity demands we all share. A book of blue-collar poetry, with a surrealist bent, this work is also a reminder of the importance of that great swelling laughter that must always persist under the hard advancing glare of these many unforgiving days.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Evergreen Review, Red Fez, Horror Sleaze Trash and The Blue Collar Review. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.
"I felt an instant connection to Ryan Quinn Flanagan (RQF)'s words the first time I stumbled across his work online. RQF is a prolific, unassuming champion and chronicler of off-kilter humanity. In his new collection from Roadside Press, These Many Cold Winters of the Heart, RQF returns to dust off his wings after, once more, being a fly on the wall. Here is a writer who understands that poetry exists everywhere, and that most people don't see it. If they do, most lack the skill to distill the sadness in "The Nacho Lady at the Midnight Bingo;" the regret of the Narrator in, "Did you Amber Heard your bed again?;" or the mix of bravery and confusion of the boy in "Black Motorcycles." On each page we encounter pieces of ourselves, or people we know, despite the unique details. "Lucky to be in the nuthouse, / I thought./ We were living/ in strange times," writes RQF in "The Yellow Bed." Indeed. We are lucky to have these strange missives, fresh from our current, absurd reality."-Jordan Trethewey, author of These Are the People in Your Neighbourhood