Tax-Free Phrases

Michael Maiello’s new work is published at the height of the April tax season—an appropriate time for a collection of poetry that is tax-free, without any extra cost for the reader. His verse is cheaper than usual, expurgated of any added governmental tariffs. 

But the savings is just part of the reward for serious readers. They will appreciate that Maiello, by using the voice of a meditative narrator who is intent on accounting for much of the sense of wonder and confusion that our state of affairs promotes, is dedicated to looking at the full ledger. Where do the numbers go awry? Where do they make sense? Where do they just don’t add up?

In the aggregate, his style is a sum of first-personal narration, omniscient introspection, imagist description, and a bevy of puns and allusions that start with the title itself.

Maiello is of that group of watchdog poets who always sniff for beauty and ugliness, who write defiant verse, who are foes of tyranny, and who brood about political tension. As Percy Bysshe Shelley put it, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”