In these remarkable poems, Benevento continues his laser-like depiction of the blue-collar, Italian-American culture of his Queens childhood, coming of age, and subsequent adulthood spent in other locales, and he does so with subtle verbal artistry honed to near perfection. His seemingly simple diction and the propulsive "stories" of his narratives belie not only the assured poetic skill of an experienced poet but also the uncanny insight and hard-earned wisdom of a life fully lived.

Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, Member, Texas Institute of Letters

The poetic voice in Joe Benevento's The Cracker Box Poems often reminds one of Walt Whitman's autobiographical expansiveness in its sheer embrace of experience. At the same time, the compelling plot lines of many narrative poems can as readily evoke Raymond Chandler (Benevento, also a master of detective fiction, mentions Chandler in a powerful poem about getting lost). Incisive, revelatory endings for all poems approach perfection, in a modern equivalent of Shakespeare's epigrammatic sonnet endings. All in all, the poetic art that a reader is immersed in in this highly original and compelling collection is Benevento's alone.

Lee Slonimsky, author of Bright Yellow Buzz and Pythagoras in Love

From a diverse, working-class Queens neighborhood emerge Joe Benevento's coming-of-age poems of promise, misconnection, and loss. Yearnings that are undone by youthful awkwardness, peer pressure, the strictures of grownups, happenstance, and the passage of time, as when chipping collected rocks in the cellar of a boyhood friend and "... aware almost anything / could happen. This very next rock might shine / flecks of gold or hopeful bits of green beryl precious / to us, cementing our friendship on the dusty cellar / floor, until time, like someone's tidy mother, / would discard the evidence forever." Benevento reminds us that each passage of life is a coming-of-age; each entailing the acquisition of mixed memories; each providing a bittersweet bonding with time itself.

Mark Belair, author of the companion works, Stonehaven and Edgewood