Hard To Be a Hero

Alec Solomita's poems are precise and lucid in observation and expression alike, elegant and passionate accounts of those moments in life that stop us in our tracks and yet ultimately keep us going. Luminous visions of childhood, surreal dream images, desire's potent lineaments (both gratified and not), memories of a beloved partner-through some alchemy, Solomita's poems cause these disparate, sometimes startling ingredients to coalesce into a single elixir, the final sip of which contains the flavors of all, mingled yet distinct.
John Canaday is the author of Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project, The Invisible World, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs.


Alec Solomita is one of our most mellifluous, vigorous, witty, and truth-loving poets. His work reveals a spirited dexterity with form and a crisp, clear voice. He is like no one else in his refined sarcastic mode. He pokes fun at both himself and society but betrays his vulnerability when speaking of those whom this poet has loved or lost. He can both sing in meter and converse in free verse, of things both small and big, a whole universe of them.

The work of bilingual Russian poet and fiction writer Katia Kapovich has been celebrated in both her native and adopted countries. She received the US Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. Her two books in English are Gogol in Rome (2004) and Cossacks and Bandits (2008).
Alec Solomita is a master of casual yet delicate surrealism. He is also a poet with both feet squarely planted in candor. It is upon this honesty that Solomita's work rests so buoyantly. Hard to Be a Hero is finely peppered with a sophisticated innocence: the white soles of his little brother's Converse All-Stars dance and vanish on the dime-bright air; as the speaker approaches seventy, a "child comes with me,/taking my hand as a child will.

Frannie Lindsay, author of The Snow's Wife.