George Guida is the author of ten books, including five collections of poems. His latest, Zen of Pop (Long Sky Media) and the revised edition of New York and Other Lovers (Encircle Publications), appeared in 2020. His debut novel, Posts from Suburbia (Encircle), will be published in June 2022. He teaches creative writing, literature and cultural studies at New York City College of Technology.

Other poems by George Guida in Verse Daily:
October 17 2015:   "Zombies All Around" "They fall forward through heavy brush..."

Books by George Guida:

Other poems on the web by George Guida:
"Bolivian Orphanage, Late in the Day"
"Love Duet in My Father's Age"
"Tuesday Evening"
"The Coach's Last Day"
"Irish Channel"
"​Damned Vile Race"
"Italians in Space"
Three poems
Three poems

George Guida's Website.

About Zen Of Pop:

"'You want people to pay attention, but they so rarely do,' George Guida writes, and that's the problem, isn't it? The speakers of the poems in this book keep reaching for Zen—some form of peace, of calm, of meditative understanding—but pop is always getting in the way. Pop as in noise. As in music. As in stars. As in the swirling, chaotic culture around us. Formally varied and full of sound, these poems record our oh-so-human attempts to figure out who we are in a world that doesn't make it easy. Zen as in hope. Pop as in bang."
—Amorak Huey

"I've never read a book that begins with: I dream of Barry Manilow. But, then, I've never read a book like Zen of Pop. From Sam Cooke to Aretha, from Sly Stone, Joan Jett, to Ron Wood—George Guida obsesses, records, and let's just say it—he falls in love with everyone. These poems wake us with original voice, delight us with enticing details of music history, and sandblast story with a voice that risks intimacy: I just played my tune. / How I wanted to be / a waitress when I was young, / before the music … These tender, rousing poems of freedom and loneliness take us inside the songs, the singer, the players—all the way to the wildman Iggy Pop in the final poem … Let us outlive history."
—Jan Beatty

"George Guida dreams of Barry Manilow singing in German. He swoons to Sam Cooke, fancies his voice 'the smoky bandit,' and rides the Boulevard of Death through the Neighborhoods of Doom. In short, he grew up in America and had access to a radio, if not an eight track. Icons rise and fade, the Beatles die off, and one day his Russian barber yells, 'Dye!' as gray hairs fall in his lap—and as Paul McCarthy's hair 'resists degeneration.' Fueled by the spark of these observations and the music of the lyric form, Zen of Pop is a soundtrack that is all Guida and a little of the rest of us, too. It will keep you humming through the power chords, dancing to the distant smoke."
—Lynn McGee