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Haunting and unsettling, this chapbook of profoundly beautiful poems captured my heart.

With many written in a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness style, the author (poet) blends vivid imagery plucked from the natural world, (almost hallucinogenic in the brightness of its metaphorical flow), with the poignant and evocative musings of a soul in search of solace and understanding (both the need to understand as well as to be understood) as he grapples with life’s eternal questions.

So richly-layered, this is a book that called out for slow and unrestrained reading, –
(so deeply personal an experience that ultimately, the meanings that emerged for this reader may or may not have been precisely as relevant to the author, or other readers, for that matter.)

Here are some of my favorites.

• Mosquito – An amalgam of beautiful imagery, this poem captures the terror of seemingly tenuous (unvoiced) love and its unstoppably fluid recursively-manic emotional fallout.

• The cacophony – Haunting and goose-bump inducing recognition of our finite and composite smallness in a world embracing infinity.

• The sky rinses my hands – Grief. Loss. Brotherhood. Blame and finding respite.

• Present – Gorgeous rendering of the struggle between the yearning for dissolution (a major theme throughout this volume) as represented in the bigness of the Universe (Nature, the Ocean, the Earth and the Sky) and its ever-present ability to subsume us (take us back ), versus the urgent lure of an identity, in love, rooted in the here-and-now, with everything that matters.

• The Stack – Identity and longing, despair and redemption, tangled within the bigness and unknowingness of love and being loved. Our too-linear focus on past, present and future versus the timelessness of the vast and all-encompassing (the Sea).

A great big thank you to the author for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.