"Kevin Opstedal is a local: born and raised in Venice, CA where the pavement meets the Pacific. The lyric missives that make up this collection are poems of place as substantive as beach sand or the crackle of gun fire. I see Opstedal in an old car in a palm-lined beach parking lot in a gray mist south of Point Dume listening to an eight-track of rare surf music and writing it all down; "The Poems" tattooed on one bicep. Working class - his father was a carpenter who somehow managed to keep Kevin and his siblings in Catholic schools - he skipped college to teach himself how to write poems. He discovered his palate in the bleached abstracts of Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" paintings. Like Ted Berrigan, the poet he most resembles, Opstedal eschews misty emotions and wavering intellect. His poems are hard-nosed without being hard-hearted. For him, the California Redemption Value of these poems is a glimpse of beauty and love. That would have to be enough." -- Lewis MacAdams