"These poems wake up slumbering compartments of the brain. The Attention Lesson is a sleek fleet of uncompromising, compact, urgent prose poems that feel like freshly chiseled, postmodern petroglyphs. Each piece is an immediate, thrumming, palm sized passion play: substantive and mysterious, awash in off rhymes and spanning the human-animal-object continuum. Images, states of consciousness, facts, descriptions and sense perceptions all morph into and through each other in emotionally useful ways that seem new and surprising yet also quite recognizable. How does PF Potvin do this? Dear Reader: when you figure out his secret, will you write and let me know?"

— Amy Gerstler

"Potvin’s observances of the human experience, its common ritual, psychological effects, parade of ethos, and even the creation of our own mythologies and parables, stands as a reminder that the depiction of the human dilemma is indeed universal, comprehendible across continents and cultures."

— Michael Parker, MiPOesias


"Since these are prose poems, often of the somewhat surreal or comically askew variety, my first thought naturally was of James Tate -- except it turns out these poems aren't very Tate-like.

Potvin's prose poems are much more economical, number-of-words-wise, for one thing. More poem-like. Also they're less anecdotal; they tell stories, but they're doing more than that. For instance -- and this is what's most important to me -- there's art here at the level of the word and phrase that I admire."

— Matthew Thorburn

"I want you to know Utah from these pictures of me standing."

The stories in this book are quick enough to read during your "in between" times. But the effect of the stories will linger much longer. With each piece ranging from just one sentence to one paragraph in length this collection is surprisingly potent with imagery and emotion. You can't always see the characters in these pieces but you can always feel them. A must read for anyone looking to find the unexpected.