Some novelists gently chisel their thoughts and ideas into refined, disciplined works of art, taking care to respect tradition and leave nary a flake of rock where unneeded. By contrast, ulcerous Ohioan Noah Cicero uses the language like a baseball bat, pounding his mind and soul and channeling his rage and suffering through the simplest form imaginable, a style he calls "existential minimalism." ...Fans of Beckett and Bukowski are hereby placed on notice.
— Emerson Dameron, Zine World
The strife and anger that resides and breeds like a mutated rabbit in such an unsettling city as Youngstown is found in all of Noah’s words. Noah’s words hold harshness and quickness to them, and with most stories being built on character’s thoughts rather than long drawn out dialog the true presence of Youngstown is always felt in how characters tend to abide in a vulgar anger reaction to the hopelessness of their situation. All this creates a trademark that always points back to Youngstown, just like how the echo of doom sound Tony Iommi made in Black Sabbath always harked back to life in the unemployed city of Birmingham, England no matter what pile of apocalyptic visions Ozzy sang about.
— Matt DeBenedictis
Vassily, the voice of Noah Cicero’s new novel, is a different sort of insurgent. An insurgent battling abjection, poverty, and depression in a 21st century Middle America rapidly devolving into Third World inscrutability. In his fifth work of fiction, the Rustbelt’s voice of defiance puts forth his most anti-heroic message to date, bringing us back to the “homeland” to see that the real insurgency lies within ourselves.
Noah Cicero is the author of several novels, including The Human War, Burning Babies, Treatise, and The Condemned. He has been published in numerous online and print journals, including Black Ice, Identity Theory, Noo Journal, and Prague Literary Review. His first novel, The Human War, is currently being made into an independent film. He is 29, lives in Youngstown, Ohio, and studies Political Science at Youngstown State University.
“It just seems like the world is heavy. That it is like a big cement monster that is crushing me, that is pummeling me with scorpion claws, stinging me, biting me alive, throwing bricks at my head, slamming cinder blocks on my nuts, eating me, showing me that I am worthless, that my life on this planet is a futile little pile of meat that ends in immobility, death, then sent underground with a shitty tombstone that doesn’t signify who I was, what I was about. It just states my name, year of birth and day of death. I don’t feel lucky at all to be alive.”