Cool & Other Poems

This powerful collection of poems in free verse probes the quotidian details of Malanga’s life as he wrestles to recall it through dreams and memory. Comprised of five sections (Autobiographies, The Cats in My Life, “The Lives They Lived,” Stories, and “The ray of the divine …”), the book presents a tumultuous search for self in one’s mental cache and questions its actuality with bittersweet, raw emotion. By turns wry and achingly sincere, the poems have the feel and sequence of a dream—jagged, taking unexpected turns, at times ambiguous. They becry an existential crisis borne of isolation and loss.