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Much like his music, Eric Paul’s poems are sharp and strange and unafraid. When it comes to the honest thing, the unsentimental, the line that cuts the legs out from under the obvious, Paul is the real deal, a guy who, to paraphrase the man himself, can get some.
-Sam Lipsyte (author of Venus Drive, The Subject Steve, Home Land, and The Ask)
I first discovered Eric Paul through his music project, Doomsday Student. I was immediately drawn to how uniquely horrible it was in the best way. I was then lucky enough to interview him for my book Perfect Sound Whatever and found the stories behind the songs to be equally arresting and confronting while also managing to be humorous when they needed to be. And so, I'm understandably delighted to read “Providence,” a book that captures Eric's singular voice in an uncompromising, unflinching manner. A book that can make you cry one on one page then laugh on the next.
- James Acaster (Comedian, Actor, and Author of Classic Scrapes, Perfect Sound Whatever, and James Acaster's Guide to Quitting Social Media)
Like the dual nature of its name implies, Eric Paul has created in “Providence” a collection that occupies both the tragic and the absurd, the hyper-specific and the universal, the unsettling and the deeply moving. In clean, unblinking prose, he winds a thread of familial shame and childhood horrors around the throat of a present marked by fear, anxiety, love, and longing that tightens with every word. It's arresting, beautiful work.
- Jordan Blilie (Lyricist & Vocalist of The Blood Brothers, Head Wound City, Past Lives)
In Providence Eric Paul poses the body as a public space, as an industrial site, a city of endless changeability. Truth, like a body, like a city, like a poem, is an always-becoming thing. What is true in one line is reborn anew in the next. Every sincere confession upends into the surreal. Every image refuses to mean what you want it to mean. From the umbilical noose to truck stop ghosts, from the unending mysteries of the family to the firm ground of the next record one puts on the turntable, this world of Paul’s, this “Providence,” is unstable, a delight & a horror & a prayer.
- Mathias Svalina (Founder of the Dream Delivery Service, whose eight poetry collections include Destruction Myth, The Wine-Dark Sea, Wastoid, and Thank You Terror)
Eric Paul writes pointed flash monologues in verse—compact poems that reach for the revelatory volta from the gutter—hardboiled Freudian telegrams. It’s a mechanique he’s been honing since his first non-pseudonymous book, I Offered Myself as the Sea. Paul’s poems justify their autohagiographical this-all-really-happen’d-&-it-happen’d-to-me stance by their insinuating radiance—by placing the reader at the center of a deceptively universal—mything—melodrama. The very best ones make the reader feel like she’s been held underwater to view a living Bosch painting and quickly restored to fresh air.