Book Review : Greg Puciato - Separate the Dawn (2019)

if heaven waits for you

then salvation must be mine

(Fireflies)

Greg Puciato is primarily known for being the lead vocalist of The Dillinger Escape Plan from 2001 up to their breakup in 2017. He's also in The Black Queen, my new favorite band Better Lovers, tours with rock icon Jerry Cantrell and has a pretty productive solo career. In 2017, Puciato was touring with Dillinger for the last time and survived a bus crash in Poland, leaving a lot of his certitudes up in the air. From that mindset of transition and insecurity was born Separate the Dawn, a more intimate and vulnerable project.

Separate the Dawn is a collection of poetry and photography taken from a larger collection of journal entries from September 2016 to December 2017, the period where Dillinger ended and a new life was about to reveal itself to Pucatio. I got a Kindle copy because the physical version of Separate the Dawn is out of print, which doesn’t look as good, but I read it to gain a different, deeper perspective into the mind of an artist I love and I believe it was the point of the whole exercise for Puciato too.

Overstepping his fears to unlock a new part of his journey.

to those of you I've lost

that pained me to love

please know that I tried

(Sympton of Terminal Illness)

There's a confessional energy to Separate the Dawn. I'm not trying to put words in Greg Puciato's mouth, but he discusses the choices that lead him down a volatile path and vows to embrace a future that won't leave him adrift the way he'd been at the moment of writing these journal entries. The poem From a Position of Love claims: from a position of strength comes love/from a position of love comes strength, two lines that highlight a path forward for him. These are the writings of a man firmly holding on to life.

The balancing act of Separate the Dawn is not between ying and yang or good and evil, but between life and death and the past and the present. Some of the poems in the collections are about moments of destruction and entropy and others are about combative and uplifting feelings, blazing a path through the rubbles of the lives that were and the lives that could’ve been. Sometimes it clearly refers to his career like in All There Was to See and sometimes it’s more personal, like in You Don't Say Much.

to hurt myself

to harden myself

so that others cannot

(So that Others Cannot)

I don't want to read too deeply into Separate the Dawn as it is the testimony of a quite personal journey and there could be an entire symbolic ecosystem that I'm oblivious to, but the collection worked its magic the way any poetry is supposed to. There's a school of thought claiming any writing doesn't have any set meaning until it is read and interpreted and Separate the Dawn just inspired me at being most honest with myself and wear my flaws on my sleeve o that I can embrace who I really am and not who I think I am.

Separate the Dawn is kind of for Dillinger/Puciato completists like me. I don't think every metalhead needs to read this. It's a right place/right time/right person kind of deal and I always loved the physical level of commitment Greg Puciato has shown to his art over the years and Separate the Dawn was a great introduction to the person behind the monster performer. You will know if you need to read this book. It will choose you before you choose it. It’s my favorite kind of art.

7.7/10

* Follow me on Instagram to keep up with new posts *