Listen up, folks: Chris Tusa has written a nasty little novel that somehow lifts close to grace its downtrodden and sometimes blackhearted inhabitants. They're fallen and broken, but like the New Orleans through which they stagger and flail, they are lovely ruins-and like New Orleans they are only one storm away from the End Times. Witness the storm, as told by Tusa: Dirty Little Angels.

--Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack

Dirty Little Angels is a powerful novel - fast paced, riveting, and gritty. In this remarkable novel, Chris Tusa renders revelations about urban teens with startling honesty and deep compassion. Tusa is a gifted author and an amazing new talent.

--Bev Marshall, author of Right as Rain and Walking through Shadows

Dirty Little Angels is rich with characters who are beautifully flawed and within arm’s reach of redemption. Troubled yet pure hearted, fourteen-year-old Hailey ultimately reveals, to those willing to see it, that the truth does set you free. This is a raw and tender debut.

--Ronlyn Domingue, author of The Mercy of Thin Air

Dirty Little Angels is literary, but alive and muscular at the same time. This is a book that deserves to be published.

--John R. Reed, author of Thirteen Mountain and The Kingfisher's Call

Inside what appear to be harmless little things -- miniature Bibles, folded t-shirts, catfish -- Chris Tusa has hidden firecrackers and bottlerockets. Inventing an End's poems are filled with bang! and woosh!, with surprises and truth.

--Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack

Chris Tusa, like the tornado at the center of his book, chases our dark shadows - our murderers and missing children and dead uncles - until they die "like characters in some great myth." In Tusa's witness, the lost dictate their own elegies, and we have only to stand with him, on the banks where the light has drowned, and listen.

--Jake Adam York, author of Murder Ballads

In Haunted Bones, Chris Tusa probes uncharted waters with courage, with energy, strength and clarity of vision. Microscoping the incorporeal, he holds a magnifying glass up to the mind of a hypochondriac in poems detailing fear of tumors, leukemia, bad weather or the sky falling. Intense and compelling, Haunted Bones is a vivid and hard edged collection. Chris Tusa’s poems cannot be folded and sailed out into the night because like a boomerang in the shape of “Satan’s hipbone,” they return and linger in the recesses of the mind.

--Vivian Shipley, author of When There Is No Shore, Fair Haven, and How Many Stones?

Chris Tusa's poems are darkly visionary, calling on the beauty of the natural world to illuminate the murk and drift of human motives and action. Here is a striking collection of poems that engages and unsettles, soothes with the aesthetic what it roils with dark narratives. A tense, often beautiful, and promising debut.

--Sidney Wade, author of Green, Celestial Bodies, and Empty Sleeves

There are certainly times when I want a poem to look me in the eye, tell me the truth, grab my collar, and walk me through the real world.The poems in Chris Tusa’s collection, Inventing an End, accomplish this with music and beauty. Tusa’s is a rare gift of honesty and clarity. Readers will surely appreciate how his devotion to craft develops, poem by poem, in this book. I know I do.

--Jack B. Bedell, author of At the Bonehouse and What Passes for Love

Tusa's is a wonderful debut collection. The poems gathered here shimmer and pulse with familial anecdotes, humor, and a much-welcomed human touch. It is as if each poem is a conversation to which we are specially privvy, and through our listening our understanding and capacity to love increases tenfold. Mr. Tusa's ear is exacting and intune with the vernacular of our frenetic, dislocated times. A fine collection indeed.

--Virgil Suarez, author of Latin Jazz, The Cutter, Havana Thursdays, and Going Under

Haunted Bones is indeed haunted--by characters, such as Mr. Potato Head, Botticelli's Venus, and a Voodoo Priestess--and by images, such as a grandmother's teeth staring from a bedside mason jar, or bones "rattling like empty bottles of beer." The lucky reader who finds this collection will be glad to carry the ghosts of these poems into the tangerine-hued future.

--Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Open House and Tender Hooks

Chris Tusa’s poetry is poetry on steroids. Though it’s not for everybody, it’s just fine for people who appreciate good poetry.

--Greg Langley, Baton Rouge Advocate