Joe Rosenblatt

Joe Rosenblatt delights in revealing a fantastical hidden world of ravenous monsters and rapacious critters of all sorts-one in which either you're the eater, or the one who'll be consumed'.

A lyrical pilgrimage through the lush forest of the Green Man and his woodland kin, Joe Rosenblatt's latest book of poetry, The Bird in the Stillness, offers up a spiritual feast in celebration of the natural world.

Snake City takes the reader into an imaginary kingdom in the waterways of Florida, inhabited by macho gator-killers and feral pigs with murderous tusks for goring two-legged predators. At the center of this hallucinatory fable are Cottonmouth, a viper with a penchant for salty language, and his long-suffering roommate Freddie, a retired Canadian Snowbird who has stupidly purchased swamp acreage from a disreputable land developer to build his dream cabin. When both Freddie and Cottonmouth fall in love with Hilda, a shape-shifting swamp woman, a nasty ménage à trois develops. Into the grittier picture enters a religious zealot, nicknamed "Yessie" by the locals, and his stalker Handsome Harry, a ruthless alpha-gator who wants to make a fast food snack of him. Welcome to Snake City, a devouring adventure in pure evil, blood-curdling terror, and exotic dining.

Applauded as a witty and eccentric pioneer of Canadian poetry, Joe Rosenblatt is also a talented visual artist. Though several books have included Rosenblatt's black and white sketches to supplement his poetry, The Voluptuous Gardener is the first book to celebrate Joe Rosenblatt as an artist in his own right. The voluptuous gardener may well be a gardener in Eden, surrounded by the pleasure and innocence of a new world, but also dangerous temptation. The garden is populated with gentle beasts and the beast within us, sleepy cats and the brutal world of insects. An introduction by Michael Bell outlines the evolution of Rosenblatt's artwork, highlighting the archetypal nature of his images and the uneasy mixture of innocence and perversity.