Had Charles Bukowski and Mary Karr birthed a literary bastard-child, it could have been Rodney DeCroo. From the banks of the Allegheny River to the west coast of Canada comes a fighter and survivor that has chosen poetry and song as his weapons of defence. These poems show you what happens to the traumatized children of drunken, negligent and equally traumatized parents. Children and teens living in powder keg homes whose “safe place” is a hiding spot behind the furnace, the streets, abandoned houses, and condemned factories.

These pages are stained by people that have done horrible things and had horrible things done to them: neglected Vietnam vets, out of work coal miners, desperate and violent men with nothing but rage for a world that used them up like canisters of propane. Fishing for Leviathan is not a work about the privileged and entitled, but the trapped wage-earners and broken labourers that make the world of the privileged possible. And it is all anointed with liberal quantities of booze and drugs which, of course, make the situations worse; but they also make the days and nights bearable.

These are poems from a writer who has crawled through a mile of broken glass and come out the other side more or less intact.

Sobriety, meetings, counselling, therapy, and good friends are the balm and glue that put the broken back together again.

Advance praise for Fishing for Leviathan

“Rodney DeCroo’s work reveals again and again that he’s as true a poet as any writing today. Like all poets who can lay claim to authenticity, he’s a troubled marriage of heaven and hell, and in this collection he has brought forth fierce, finely honed poems that are at once brutal and uniquely beautiful. Fishing for Leviathan is a piercing imaginative document and a clear, redemptive revelation of what it is to be alive.”

– Russell Thornton, author of Answer to Blue