Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs

"Aficionados of this esteemed San Francisco writer’s work know him, perhaps primarily, as a poet gifted with a lean but luxuriant language of place . . . You can’t read this writer without knowing exactly where he is and where he’s been. The pleasures and gratifications of his prose are by no means merely geographical. With his pellucid style, which seems at once expansive and tightly wrought, patiently intuitive and purposeful, Kleinzahler is exceptionally good at tracking not only his own often adamant thoughts and abundant enthusiasms . . . but at registering the felt life of the world and people around him . . . Kleinzahler is enormously good company on the page. We know him, by the end of these diverse Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs, not because of any breast-bearing confessions or self-inflated arguments. Instead, in his acuity of thought and feeling, there’s the unmistakable vitality of a man standing squarely where he is and trying to understand whatever's there to seize and occupy his full attention."—Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle

"Kleinzahler is a plain speaker who knows his way around a sentence and understands the duty of a critic. He exhibits taste and good sense, he knows the difference between judgment and opinion, and he picks just the right quotations . . . By turns wistful, sardonic, wry, and occasionally silly, this collection offers genuine pleasure."—Michael Autrey, Booklist