John Allman

Loew's Triboro John Allman

An evocative, often mischievous remembrance and reinvention by the poet of his youth in the New York City of the '40s and '50s.

In Loew's Triboro, John Allman's fourth collection of poems with New Directions, the poet recalls the movie palace in Astoria, Queens?one of the five boroughs of New York City?and its centrality to the lives and fantasies of the people in the neighborhood. In a combination of prose poems and free verse, sometimes darkly funny, Allman juxtaposes vignettes from the streets of Astoria with the movies of the period, revisioning such film noir classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and The Asphalt Jungle. The book itself becomes a narrative place where real and cinematic lives interact, where movies are the engines of history and myth and the motif of journey is implicit from the first poem to the last.