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Minotaur Snow Editorial Description

Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s Minotaur Snow is an urban menagerie of very human poems.  Difficult situations, individual foibles, that unescapable rush of the modern city; the sights and sounds and smells and touch, all told with great humour and at times, compassion.  Flanagan peoples the landscape in such a way that his experiences become your experiences, his revelations and perspectives a busy populous of comings and goings all captured in a language that is both highly accessible and littered with odd notions or turns of phrase.  Minotaur Snow, above all else, is a book that captures what is timeless to our shared experience, but with a fierce individuality that washes over everything like a heavy falling snow.

Sample Poems from Minotaur Snow

Terrible Goldfish

I see your wide swimming mouth
the bubbles your tiny life makes

dirty bowl fin flapping through 
my mind

the cats detest you, terrible goldfish,

you give them a hunger 
thwarted by a simple 
screen

I watch them fail 
and think of Napoleon 
in Russia

the way men will follow men 
to folly,
but get angry and tailgate a single car
not going fast enough

and the orange you speak of 
is gone so fast it never colours 
anything

I look for orange you, terrible goldfish,
the many hues on the walls; 
scour the galleries without ever knowing
you have left.

(first appeared in Our Poetry Archive)


Why Sleep is a Spider with Fangs 

The day was a forgery 
so the night could get away 
with stars
that is how the brain-trust remembers
turtles out of lumbering monotony shells  
plodding spherical skullduggery 
and a latch across the basement door
applesauce spoons used for heroin 
our faithful commissioner recommissioned
to linger too long anywhere is to imitate shadows
to lay under bodies and remember the parks 
of your childhood, how the parents pretended to watch
and everything else was just pretend
and later nicotine rings to joggle the mind
St. Adrian in the window standing guard;
I have left you so many times the harbourmaster
is asking questions.

(first appeared in Our Poetry Archive)

© Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Praise for Minotaur Snow

Ryan Quinn Flanagan throws one heck of a party. Rub elbows with the likes of Darwin, Kahlo, Cocteau, Monroe, Mingus, Fellini, even Fay Wray, in this deliciously cynical collection. Quinn Flanagan’s noir humor, coupled with first-rate poetic chops results in a darkly brilliant book you’ll find hard to put down.

— Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of EXPLICIT: New & Selected, poetry editor, Cultural Daily

Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s Minotaur Snow is a terrific poetry collection that sparkles with the living moment.  Always readable, always thoughtful, Flanagan’s poems offer great truths in everyday experiences.  Whether in the basement laundromat, or at the gym, Flanagan makes fantastic worlds out of the mundane.

Mike Fiorito, author of Falling from Trees

Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s new book Minotaur Snow picks up where his recent Crossdressing with Heidegger left off as a wry, observant poet’s exploration of his sometimes squalid world. Minotaur Snow contains even more variety, beginning with “How Lovers Become Informants,” set in a contemporary version of Orwell’s 1984. I encourage you to explore Ryan’s sardonic, insightful delineations of our world. You have probably read his widely-published poems in any number of blog-zines; reading them in conjunction with each other is delightfully rewarding.

Marianne Szlyk, author of On the Other Side of the Window and Poetry en Plein Air

Minotaur Snow is available on the publisher’s website and widely available online. Here is the Amazon link:

Paperback

Author Biography

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Evergreen Review, Red Fez, Horror Sleaze Trash and The Blue Collar Review. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.