Christopher E. Grillo

Heroes’ Tunnel: ($15, 96pp, 6X9”, ISBN: 978-1-68114-238-8; $30: Hardcover ISBN-978-1-68114-252-4; $2.99: EBSCO EBook ISBN-978-1-68114-253-1, LCCN: 2016935839, April 25, 2016; Purchase on Amazon, Google Books, or Barnes & Noble): follows the speaker as he comes of age in a broken American landscape complete with high school football heroics, hard labor, the resentment of first love, and the ties of friendship that bind forever. The poems are moments pinpointed because each is vital to the speaker’s concession that the “characters” in his life are not meant to serve his narrative. Nor is he meant to serve theirs. This acceptance is ultimately freeing, allowing the speaker to let go of what “should be” and accept “what is.”

Christopher Grillo has published fiction and poetry in various journals and anthologies including Sport Laureate, Typoetic, Drunk Monkeys, Noctua, Spry, Biline, and more. Grillo is a graduate of the University of New Haven where he played strong safety for the Chargers and of Southern Connecticut State University’s MFA program. He is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: When Rain Fills the Chasm and The Six-fold Radial Symmetry of Snow. A middle school teacher in New Haven, Connecticut, Grillo moonlights as an assistant football coach at his high school alma mater.