Taliban Beach Party
"As adept working with the sonnet and sestina as with loose-fitting lines, Howard produces poems of great immediacy that stir with emotional depth. . . . [His] vision of our post-9/11 culture is offbeat, yet 'wisdomtight.'"—David Trinidad
Eric Howard’s debut poetry collection reveals the secrets that bind office work to war, Gidget to the damned, the Bible to popular song, mythology to fact, and Los Angeles to Ovid. On a bicycle ride through heavy traffic, it versifies the last days of a failed pimp, gives a tarot reading to warplanes, and deciphers the hieroglyphics of lost empire.
Eric Howard is an LA-based poet and editor. His work has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Caveat Lector, Conduit, Gulf Stream Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Plainsong, The Sun, and in the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond.
California-born poet Eric Howard has spent most of his life in Los Angeles. After receiving a degree in English at Pomona College, Eric worked as a substitute teacher while living in an illegally converted basement apartment in the neighborhood of Silver Lake. There, he wrote Sinner.
He later used his retirement money to buy a house and be the live-in landlord of a bunch of misfits. This included taking part in pranks and art projects put on by the Los Angeles Cacophony Society.
He also obtained a master’s degree in English from California State University Los Angeles, studying formal poetry with Henri Coulette. This allowed him to bring his punk sensibility to verse. He is a frequent reader around Southern California, including at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. For almost two decades, he has worked as a magazine editor, which has informed his poetry about office life.
His book, Taliban Beach Party, addresses 9/11 and its aftermath in the context of Los Angeles history, beginning with satire but concluding with prophecy. The title poem describes a Cacophony event that took place at Dockweiler Beach in October 2001.
