"The New World Book of Webbs"
from Charles Harper Webb's
Amplified Dog

Charles Harper Webb:

Charles Harper Webb was a rock guitarist for fifteen years and is now a licensed psychotherapist and professor at Cal State University, Long Beach. He has written five books of poetry, including Liver, which won the 1999 Felix Pollak Prize, and Reading the Water, which won the S.F. Morse Poetry Prize and Kate Tufts Discovery Award.)

About Amplified Dog:

"I've admired the warm weirdness and eccentric brilliance of Charles Harper Webb's poems for many years now. His is the voice of that strange kid with the genius IQ you met in junior high school who knew, prophetically, what a huge drag adulthood was going to be, who read Mad magazine and listened to Dr. Demento and hung out with the wrong crowd: the imagination and his buddies, sanity and laughter. Enter the cool room of Webb's poems, and after sampling his Little Richard collection in 'Ooh My Soul,' you'll encounter, certainly for the first time, seven kinds of hair, the planet Fazbag, the merkin-maker Jemmie Webb of Kent, new sprinklers that 'rachet on with the screech of strangled grebes,' Coach Blummer, extinct animals compared to children at a firedrill, a 'sad bus' ('Its doors hiss open, and weeping pours out'), King Solomon's hit man, 'Bat Boy, ' easy-to-follow directions on how to live and, of course, an amplified dog. These and a hundred other sublimely funny and vividly serious delights await you. This is, in my opinion, Webb's best book so far, which is to say that it's the best of the best. Everybody should read it. Now. Everybody."
— B. H. Fairchild

"There's always a freshness and generosity to the poems of Charles Harper Webb. Their generosity is both linguistic and spiritual. Linguistically, they always snap, crackle and pop. They are spiritual in their honesty and in their ultimate compassion. In the vigor of their engagement – in their warlike cockadoodledoo and their companionable bow wow wow – they convince us of the healing powers of language and imagination."
— Tony Hoagland

"Charles Harper Webb is a splashy, hilarious, and disarming poet. In his newest book, Amplified Dog, he explores the, strange and sideways means in which humans try to communicate with one another. The poems themselves are direct, sharp, Technicolor masterpieces in perfect contrast to his themes. Amplified Dog is an innovative and charming book, a smart, accessible, and uneasy read."
— Denise Duhamel

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