Fun Being Me

Four years ago, Jack Wiler was hospitalized with AIDS. This book is his attempt to talk about what it is to die and live again. The collection is far more than his struggle with the AIDS virus. Wiler aims for the hard truth as he writes about the world, money, jobs, love, sex, and death. As Wiler says, “It can be loud and it can be soft but it is never quiet.”

Jack Wiler was raised in New Jersey and lived in Jersey City until his death in 2009. Diagnosed with AIDS in 2001, Jack spent the last years of his life writing and educating students about poetry. For much of his life, he worked in pest control, most notably for Acme Exterminating in New York. He worked for Long Shot Magazine for many years and in association with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation worked as a visiting poet in the schools. Jack’s words can be found online at http://jackwiler.blogspot.com and in his two CavanKerry collections, Fun Being Me (2006) and Divina Is Divina (2010).

The Taste of Beer in Late Fall

I need to talk to my brother now.
I need to tell him
my house is clean.
I fixed the broken chest
of drawers. I need to tell
him about the Palisades.
The Hoboken Library, a tuscan
ruin in a pale, pink dawn.
I need to tell him
I’m falling in love
That trees have been stripped
of their leaves after a hard
cold rain.
That I’ve been on my knees
scrubbing.
Tears at my throat nearly every day
and I need to tell him I’m sitting
alone in this clean house
waiting.
My heart beating so loud
it fills the room.
I’m waiting.
He needs to know.
I need to tell.

Jack Wiler’s poems are rock-bottom genuine, totally direct, and disarmingly moving. He’s the Nazim Hikmet of Hoboken; his poems are full of great love for the broken world, great love for his fallen fellow human beings, and great rage at the inequity of things. And, somehow, hope, here in this world where “gorgeous rains of light / on?a cold August night . . . / might mean god is watching. / Not well or close, / but watching.”
— Mark Doty

Jack Wiler thinks his life is not fun so he invites the reader to have fun . . . It is the glint of real that sparks every line in his new book . . . Wiler is one of our most underrated poets, and if you haven’t read him yet, here you go. In this book he even broaches his time with AIDS, a topic till now verboten for him. Fun Being Me is one of the best ten books of the year!
—Bob Holman, AboutPoetry.com

An aficionado of American absurdity, Jack Wiler writes poems that are droll, harrowing, angry, and disarming as they refuse mere consolation. A moralist in the tradition of Lenny Bruce, Wiler delights in the hypocrisies we blithely call normality. He is—happily—not above name-calling and he calls himself most of those names. His poetry is a perpetual wake-up call, a joke that won’t quit, an intuition about human nastiness that refuses to make nice, and, sometimes, an exultation about how this stupid world is too good to be true.
— Baron Wormser

September 2006
140 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-0-9723045-9-7