“Reading Anthony Tognazzini is like having a surprise party thrown in your honor on every page. I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These turns cartwheels, plants daisies, and sings love songs in honor of all that is strange, sad, serious, and sublime about being alive.”—Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season

I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is a collection of fifty-seven pieces that range in length from compressed paragraphs to ten-page stories. Characters, voices, and surreal scenarios are unified in a playful vision of the world sustained by metaphor, memory, cartoon, tragedy, love story, and song.

Speed and brevity are a large part of the collection’s design. In a culture where attention spans are shorter and more fractured, the need for a literature for the subway and the waiting room—something to resonate in the smaller gaps of our lives—is emerging. To this end, I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is quick, colloquial, and comic, yet challenges readers to think. It offers—at a glance—a journey into a fictional world that is poetic and narrative, fantastic and familiar, accessible and adventurous.

“The Difference”

Although I was never an early riser, my father always counseled me to rise with the sun.

“Early bird gets the worm!” he told me.

“Sure,” I said, “but the worm who sleeps late, lives.”

Anthony Tognazzini lives in New York City, where he makes his living as a teacher and freelance journalist. His awards include an AWP Award, an Academy of American Poets prize, a Greer Artist Foundation Fellowship, and a Hemingway Fellowship.