Synopses & Reviews
Review
"With a serious, playful attitude, Gerding tackles themes of a social nature with a dry and wry wit that he colors with his own gray matter. He talks about things that people generally think about, but are reticent to reveal." – Susan Cole, Scene Magazine
Review
"From barrooms to bedrooms to back alleys, from mall jobs to traffic jams, Gerding covers it all. This is a poet rooted in reality without fear of expressing everything he experiences from many different angles. Intimacy with a nitty-gritty edge, outstanding, honest work." – Rayn Roberts, Kiss The Beat
Description
In 1994, the year that the world lost luminaries Charles Bukowski, Bill Hicks, and Kurt Cobain, 22-year-old Greg Gerding sought to find his own voice, his language, as a writer and an intellectual. Gerding set off on a journey of self-exploration, inebriation, social deviation, and intimate relations, and chronicled his experiences with poetry and prose.
Loser Makes Good contains selected works taken from eight handwritten notebooks Gerding filled over that year. A true self-portrait of the artist as a young man, Loser follows Gerding as he questions convention, confronts obligation, and rebels against expectation in an effort to fully realize himself as an artist, and a man.
Loser Makes Good falls in line with the works of great symbolists, modernists, and decadents like Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. Gerding also cites the writings of Bukowski, Jim Morrison, and Henry Rollins as influential.