Born by Jon Boisvert. Airlie Press. 62 pages.

The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water by Cameron Barnett. Autumn House Press. 92 pages.

Advice from the Lights by Stephen Burt. Graywolf Press. 100 pages.

I Never Promised You a Sea Monkey by CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue. Editorial Pretzelcoatl. 66 pages.

Killing Summer by Sarah Browning. Sibling Rivalry Press. 93 pages.

How to Prove a Theory by Nicole Tong. Washington Writers’ Publishing House. 70 pages.

Starshine & Clay by Kamilah Aisha Moon. Four Way Books. 112 pages.

American Software by Henry Crawford. CW Books. 89 pages.

Arrival by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. Triquarterly Books/Northwestern Univ. Press. 70 pages.

New to Guayama by David G. Lott; Spanish translation by Angel T. Tuninetti. Finishing Line Press. 71 pages.

Also: Best Prose; Best Literary Magazine; Best Anthology; and Best Spiritual Guide.

**********

Born by Jon Boisvert. Airlie Press. 62 pages.

I love this guy. I nearly called him up to tell him. Boisvert’s poems are described as “surreal” but they are more than real to me. Stark and wry — Magritte’s paintings are as close a visual that comes to mind. When I read Boisvert, poetry landscapes become a kinetic tapestry of wonder, loss and love. The only way to make sense of all this, he seems to say, is to turn objects of the world to a different dynamic. I don’t know anyone who’s doing it better than this poet. The question is: How does strange become so beautiful? Why is it that mysteries unfolded here are so clear? How does simplicity reveal depth? These questions have no answers but they live for me with the great staying power of this book. Everything on these pages delineates something left behind—not apparent but pretext and context, the nature of suffering, sometimes to the point of humor. Here is full truth. I want to tell the author these poems are understood.

Poet

There’s a poet in town who’s better than me.

I hear him on the esplanade give directions

to a tourist. Left, right. It sounds so

beautiful that I stop him, too. What do you

want, he says beautifully. Just speak more, I

plead, say anything, count to ten. Look at

that, he says after he’s done, pointing to ten

flamingos gathered at the water’s edge.

Thank you, I say, standing under ten black

balloons.

**********

The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water by Cameron Barnett. Autumn House Press. 92 pages.

Some poets say things others dare not say. The good news is that Barnett does it significantly. He hollows out American tragedies, filling them with hard truths made permanent with poetry and story. Race is the issue and the shaping circumstances described here are visceral. Passion and meaning memorialize blacks who have been sacrificed over the years. His stories are his teachings; and his teachings show a promise unfulfilled — yet by the act of art, suddenly we believe we’re finding a way out. How does this happen? Barnett takes our troubled times and breaks them down to individuals and events mandating our best attention. He generates, with perfection, language and tone that fit the victory of bravery for black people who were victimized, by expanding memory to durability. Poetry’s metabolism is raised in this book with honesty and integrity.

Black Locusts

There are no gardens in my neighborhood,

just three black locust trees

in my backyard.

All spring, cream-white petals

blooming like baby teeth,

nectar drooling from the center.

In the summer they stand

as if for a portrait,

lined up like siblings

in the corner of my window.

I grow fond of how they bend

toward each other.

By autumn they droop

and withdraw like moody teens,

leaving all their trash behind them.

They are the children I pray every night to have.

In western Pennsylvania

three seasons go by in a day.

I’m used to it.

I take the leaf blower to their bases,

a stay-at-home father cleaning out

and rearranging rooms while empty-nesting,

whistling all the while.

Later, when winter comes,

I watch kudzu creep up their trunks,

wrapping itself over every inch,

stealing away the last bits on sun.

Before the first snowfall I’ll sharpen a hatchet,

read up on girdling, stand at the window,

and wonder which sort of death they deserve.

**********

Advice from the Lights by Stephen Burt. Graywolf Press. 100 pages.

In the poem “Palinode with Playmobil Figurines,” Burt writes of a mythical family, “None of them know how low/ the imagination recedes…” and then we have a whole book to prove the opposite. Burt’s imagination is optimized by his humor and glamorous idiosyncrasies. Each poem is a way of lambasting conformity and replacing it with trust for the fanciful. Recurring themes are we will not be heard, or; what we wish is not worthwhile, or; we have few alternatives; etc. but these are merely conventions so Burt’s poems can prove them untrue. “Advice or Prayer for Airports” says, “Let the technology work/ until it fails// Until it is free/ to rust…” but instead of annihilation the poem proposes, “We should protect one another…”

And so curiously and courageously, Burt keeps saving us by making poems that are small cultural changes — one device is to make a prophetic statement and wrap it in personal detail then take a hit for the team by being the fall guy for the poem. In “My 1983,” the poem ends with a teacher’s admonition: “… We’d like you to think/ about what might be interesting to your friends, not just about what’s interesting to you.”

Poems about the speaker’s young years are funny and sweet even though Burt is always making a fist — but don’t be scared — when it opens only magic silk scarves and white doves fly out.

After Callimachus

So reactionaries and radicals complain

that I have no proprietary mission,

no project that’s all mine;

instead, I am like a child flipping Pogs

or building with Minecraft bricks, although I’m past forty.

To them I say: keep rolling logs

for one another, but don’t waste my time

imposing your inappropriate ambition:

marathon runners and shock jocks gain

by going as far as they can, but the sublime,

the useful, and the beautiful in poetry

are all inversely correlated

with size: shorter means sweeter. I’ll be fine.

When I first rated

myself as a writer of some short,

wolf-killing, light-bearing Apollo came to me

as a ferret. Stay off crowded trains, he said; never resort

to volume where contrast will do. Imitate

Erik Satie, or Young Marble Giants. The remedy for anomie

lies in between the wing-slips of the cicada.

If I can’t be weightless, or glide among twigs, or sate

myself on dew, then let

my verses live that way,

since I feel mired in age, and worse for wear.

It might even be that when the Muses visit

a girl, or a schoolboy, they intend to stay,

or else to come back, even after the poet goes gray.

**********

I Never Promised You a Sea Monkey by CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue. Editorial Pretzelcoatl. 66 pages.

Yup that’s the right title, and the poems prove it. First check out the blurbs on the back. Two are from “Some guy Michael owed$5” and the other “CL’s Cousin.” If that doesn’t give you pause, try to imagine two guys writing one poem, and then another poem, swapping lines, like Click and Clack or Cheech and Chong, but this time with intelligence, sophistication and a consummate knowledge of language (the high jinx kind). Never mind sanity. (It’s way overrated.) Strap yourself to the bed post and read this. It’s really funny. From “BIRD (BRAIN) SONG,” “Just because it rains doesn‘t mean you washed/ your car…” from “SATELLITES,” “Don’t take offense at me saying this, /but your brain has been removed and replaced/ with circuits, space jelly, and an alien clam…” From “PINK MOONS AND BLACK DOGS”: “I can’t remember the name/ but there was a song I’d never/ heard playing when you left…” From “I TOLD YOU”: “The world is burning. Throwing hundred-dollar/ bills into the flames won’t put out the fire…”

I promise I haven’t used them all up. There’s plenty more for you. The trouble is we’ll never know who wrote which line by whom. Here’s a poem written by Bledsoe and Gushue or maybe Gushue and Bledsoe.

You Deserve Better

The queen’s not hiring any new fools — not even

to polish her crown. So I’ve got on these tights

for nothing. Tell me why I was born to see

the universe in a swirl of hair, time clogging

up the drain. Something smells like cinnamon,

and I can’t seem to set it ablaze. I’m drowning

in love. Please don’t touch me. Please don’t stop

touching me. I hate everything about you

that could ever pity me for hating everything

about this. The best views are the ones

that make you the most dizzy. You, for example,

when I was watching you sleep. You weren’t

the stars. You were the empty space the stars

wanted to fill.

 

**********

Killing Summer by Sarah Browning. Sibling Rivalry Press. 93 pages.

Sarah Browning is a social activist; and poetry is a social action that stays. The book is a portrait of time spent in Italy reconciling a marriage, a compassionate look at our everyday struggles, and there are also poems that hark back to the vagaries of college days — coming-of-age — but what I like best is the way Sarah Browning tells us what a woman is. In “The Great Books, or All Theory and No Practice,” she ends, “We didn’t care about size. We would have done with/kisses, vague gropings in the woods, a book to tell us/how to love the boy in the world, the father and the land./The book of longing for each of us still writing.”

An ekphrastic poem I like is “Photo of a woman with nipples and a cigarette”: “Is she baring or bared? //The flame is a nipple. I shake//when I see it. The nipples wing //the woman into me. They hum//in the kitchen late at night.//I am red wine in the glass.//I am a crumpled napkin//on the table. I am the flame.//I am traveling to the dark lips.//The flame will soon expire.//No, it won’t.”

Because Browning is a rebel and makes change in society bigtime, her sense and sensibility about ‘the personal’ is like being invited into a room where no one has gone and where she doesn’t hide. She writes of love and friendship along with social commentary but how she does this makes all the difference. Each line in her poetry deserves the one before and the one after. This instructs the reader to keep moving — game on — there’s more ahead — we want to stay with the story because Browning knows how to unfold and reveal, gradually gracefully, making emotional connections stanza to stanza. Motion is her strong point and this is led by feeling, exposed from image. I could describe her poetic style as a slow unleashing, or a gradual revealing. This is why there’s no way we would turn away from her. The world of words shows who we are: light, heat, sorrow, song. It’s all here. She’s on the A team.

More and More

The trick is not to be so satisfied

with more and more of everything

that feeds a grievous hunger.

 Bruce Weigl

 

I can’t seem to account for my heart —

enormous crow on the telephone pole

cawing three times across the hidden

part of the neighborhood — alleys,

garages, cars on blocks, spilled

chicken bones and diapers.

The church bells are starting up.

In the dream, an old love appeared

and called to me. I couldn’t reach him,

even the dream a cliché, each door

a false beginning.

 

The church bells play “America the Beautiful.”

The mourning dove echoes a big wind

in the oak tree. Somewhere, as ever, a siren —

no Sunday morning peace. I outstare

the neighbor’s cat. I think there is no god

lolling in the clouds, enjoying

the praise. So I beg forgiveness

of the cat, the overgrown garden.

There will always be two stories.

Mine will be the bad dream,

cliché, tut-tut.

 

**********

How to Prove a Theory by Nicole Tong. Washington Writers’ Publishing House. 70 pages.

Well-structured words and clear thoughts collaborate to make beautiful declarations. These are poems of many theories. Among others, “Inaccurate Theory” where the speaker becomes one with nature; “Wistful Theory” about the losses of the earth; “Pink Pill Theory” is about human perception; “Some Theory” is the hope for belonging, especially to “place” — but what is a Theory? The dictionary tells us theory is “a system of ideas intended to explain something based on general principles outside of the thing to be explained.” What a perfect definition for poetry! Tong begins with an emotional supposition and then explores this with image and feeling. Her tone is meditative, her language always chosen not for applause lines, but to say something the best way possible. Reading Tong, we forget life’s chaos and only care for her yearnings that are so well said; and Tong is not afraid to be quiet. This really works on the page.

Intimacy Theory

            for John

 

In light of the river, the way it turns.

First a gathering of ice. Then snow

 

building a false start of the river’s edge.

Tell me what’s empirical: winter at my back

 

all season, snow turns to rain in my hair.

Tell me how many times today my body has

 

worked against itself. Thinking of you is

something like breath. A slow release of time

 

built up in my mouth. When there are no words,

no idiom will do: tie the knot, tie one on,

 

cut ties, tongue-tied. You are anything

but an obstruction. You are everything

 

if not each moment before. O

transitivity. O verb waiting to be.

 

**********

Starshine & Clay by Kamilah Aisha Moon. Four Way Books. 112 pages.

Moon writes anthems, restoring life from ruin, memorializing those exploited, displaced, murdered. Each poem’s a jewel for those lynched, hunted, killed. The massacre at Emmanuel AME Charleston, South Carolina 6.17. 15 is titled “Felicia Sanders’s Granddaughter, 5”: “Grandma was on top of me, warm. /Perfume, powder, sweat and smoke/stung my nose. I felt her heart/beating fast, so fast like after I run/but there was nowhere to run”; and in the poem “Samaria Rice, Tamir’s Mother”: “Broken hearts bound/by yellow tape. Done living at this address of can’t, /of never again, of not sorry for our loss. /Feels pointless, let me live the whole truth now/that my family has been shattered…” Literature triumphs when one has to recuperate from its force. When does Kamilah Aisha Moon make a difference? Whenever she writes a poem; there’s no high fat content in these words. It’s learned truth, muscular and viable.

It all works because of technique. Moon begins each poem a different way. Her entries are like entering a room with great expectations. Her poems come from a mind softened many nights in reading, before the writing occurs. It’s a learned work with managed strategies of good craft as carriage. Poets who try for levels of persuasion don’t persuade. Poets like Moon who rely on the radical facts of our humanity, and describe them well, produce a physical as well as mental response. Some poems here make my heart beat fast. This heroic writing is in the spirit of Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddamn!

Staten Island Ferry Ride

Boarding the boats, we risk

Middle Passage riptides

still rolling in,

badged sharks

in blue.

 

Today we board to march

for Eric Garner.

Hooked by hysterical

arms, he thrashed

like a caught thing

on the sidewalk.

 

We roil past Lady Liberty.

Draped in a dingy gown,

her smudged face

stares back.

Weeds grasp

her hem.

 

**********

American Software by Henry Crawford. CW Books. 89 pages.

Crawford’s work is gloriously original and heartbreakingly truthful. He sometimes creates new complex presentations with experimental punctuation and page aesthetics. This requires equilibrium and dexterity keeping the words intact. Invention’s circumstance is a tricky matter, but Crawford knows stories become special events by surprising content with form. Crawford has a canny ability to get into the psyche of personalities, having them explain themselves — Lyndon Johnson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Kurt Cobain, Richard Nixon — the monologues don’t call for judgment; this is the quality to praise; one feels that these unlikely candidates get a natural strength from their own words. They make no apologies and merely tell what powered their lives. Poems about the speaker’s young life show some fierce hearts and inhumane characters, but the poems don’t shirk their duties to transform. This is a luminous collection where the poet takes big chances interspersing mechanical detail, like mental notes, within the line. By this the author shows us who he is — someone willing to reorient words to challenge meaning, and with more than a little courage, trust the consequences.

Four Small Stories

1. A small boy witnesses the death of his father.

A week later he goes into the father’s closet and

picks out one of his ties. He struggles with

the ends, unable to fasten the knot.

[The boy is the brother in story #4.]

 

2. A mother searches her son’s desk drawer.

There is a small glassine bag of heroin in the

drawer but she doesn’t see it. It’s underneath a

diary that she is afraid to open.

[The mother is the woman in story #3.]

 

3. A woman stands on a street corner waiting.

She’s going to ask her husband for a divorce.

Just as he arrives she goes to check her face

in a store window but is unable to see herself.

[The husband is the father in story #1.]

 

4. A man seeks forgiveness from his brother.

It is an old wound. They sit down

across from each other in a diner booth.

They talk until they have nothing more to say.

[The man is the son in story #2.]

 

**********

Arrival by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor. Triquarterly Books/Northwestern Univ. Press. 70 pages.

One reason you may like this book is you can go to places you’ve never been and may never get to. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor takes us to glorious Trinidad with its dialect, eggplant, mangoes, lime-laden trees, banana leaves. Each place is a house for a story, a person, a relationship. And what it is to be a strong woman is writ large on every page. In the poem “Tools,” she writes, “A woman’s body has everything in it/to save her life…”

“This Pure Light” is a five-page eight- stanza poem, telling the story of a son who needs a kidney, interwoven with the conflicts all mothers face, that they not may not be worthy of their child’s life. Here’s verse 6: “That night I beg God to give me the burden forgive my sins/is it because I love a woman/God/I make a pact/God/I swear I will."

In another poem about family, the Father is featured in a poem “Riding the World: “My father had so many women/ he stepped between their funk/ riding the world Mambo/ Zouk Soca Chutney Bhangra//who could stop him his breath/thickening to paste/a caravan of limbs trailed behind him//a small room in his palm reserved for me/his river grew loud and deafening/long wounds on my mother’s doorstep.” Boyce-Taylor reaches beyond her native country, beyond herself, with archetypal language, and emotional endurance.

Tools

A woman’s body has everything in it

to save her life

 

if you must

use your legs as raft

 

heel as hammer

teeth machete

 

monthly blood as healing salve

milk for building

 

breasts as shelter

learn to breathe

 

use your locks to suture every wound

learn to scream

 

learn to scream

learn to speak

 

learn to live

within the smallest muscle of your heart.

 

**********

New to Guayama by David G. Lott; Spanish translation by Angel T. Tuninetti. Finishing Line Press. 71 pages.

It’s a good thing Lott was new to this town in southeast Puerto Rico because it allowed him to see everything with amazement. This he turned to poetry for nothing escaped the poet away from home, on sabbatical from his teaching position. He writes portraits of everyone and everything, seen as if they were experimental methods that needed solving with imagery and imagination. You will enter Tito’s neighborhood watering hole, the corner pastry shop, an ice cream shop – and we can visit these in the native language, each poem translated to accompanying Spanish. Being perceptive enriches a poet’s life, writing about it enriches ours. As you can imagine, the townspeople will be suspicious of their newcomer and there will be adventures with the local computer repair man and phone company. What would you expect if you’re new to your Guayama? These poetic investigations examine every starfruit and banana tree to the good. A poet leading an abundant life and writing about it just has to follow his best instincts and it’ll work for us.

Carambola

the haiku master Basho

named himself

after the word

for banana tree —

it’s true

 

but if he had seen

the starfruit tree

in this Guayaman courtyard

we might know him today

as Carambola

 

as every star is a sun in potential

every ripe starfruit

is a sun in miniature

and each carambola tree

a little daytime

constellation

 

**********

ALSO ON BEST BOOKS LIST

All Soul Parts Returned by Bruce Beasley. BOA Editions. 113 pages.

Fraction Rite

Solstice-swollen insomnia: its

nonordinary tempo, when I lie,

eyes open saying Latin Mass to the cadence

of my own pulse

and day-dreads hour after hour, from

ten-thirty dusk till

four o’clock dawn:

God from God, Light from Light,

Truegod from Truegod

 

Deum de Deo — with every jerking systole —

Deum — with every diastole — de Deo

on every breath-intake.

Deum verum

de Deo vero.

With Him       all things         are made.

 

Blood-throb

in the temple, blood-throb in the throat.

Pneuma-swarm and –throb seeking through the dark

something to bring back news of to the brain.

 

By-Whom-All-Things-Are-Made, make me again.

 

**********

Stumbling Blocks by Karl Kirchwey. 84 pages.

On the Janiculum, January 7, 2012

Earth has not anything to show more fair,

and you’d have to be dead inside not to feel something —

but what, exactly? There are scholars who could tell me

about the walls, arches, bath, and temples, and

it’s not that I’m that indifferent to such knowledge,

but long ago I learned to follow beauty.

The city lies flushed by sunset in its bowl,

the snow mountains on the far horizon like a dream,

as runnels of violet invade each street,

and what is left, on a winter afternoon,

is a feeling of joy so closely followed by grief

you might almost miss the moment of tenderness

in which both resolve, as if toward something vulnerable:

though the city does not have you, has never had you, in mind.

 

**********

Drugstore Blue by Susana Blue. Five Oaks Press. 71 pages.

Garden of Stone

That was the year of the garden, the year

we made nonsense. Arguments

could have had substance — the stakes

were important —

the use of the Oxford comma, for instance.

Instead, our sentences were seething

with venom,

Venus brought to her knobbed knees.

 

How could I know then you’d be one

among many, one in a garden of snakes,

leathery toads, nematodes?

I wished I could tell you something

Baroque-convoluted,

kissed you long and stringy.

Instead, I had trouble breathing,

locked myself in the folly,

a ruined pagoda. At least once a week

I said it was over because

that’s what I always do when it’s over.

I stayed,

kneeling among poisonous stems.

 

Memory turns things like that to stones

in the throat.

Foxglove.

Oleander.

Clusters of stinking nightshade.

There was a garden and then there wasn’t.

 

**********

Just Passing Through by M. Scott Douglass. Paycock Press. 94 pages.

Roadside Fantasies

He likes the way she touches

everything with her mouth, licks

the salt on his shoulder, rips

a plastic bag with her teeth, catches

snowflakes on her tongue, nibbles

on babies’ fingertips, bites her nails.

 

But none of it matters. It’s all

road mirage, memories of interactions

that never happened, never will.

 

He’s on a fuel break at a pit stop

beside a highway of strangers heading

in different directions. Alone

on a motorcycle with no radio,

no companion, his eyes rest on

whoever crosses his line of sight,

contemplate this randomness, this

almost meeting, reinvent the un-

remarkable as a means to pass the time.

 

**********

Phases by Mischa Willett. Cascade Books. 74 pages.

The Unmarried Poet Prepares

Since I will probably meet tomorrow

the woman of my dreams, mother

to my heirs, companion of hours,

the leaf grafted to my family tree

become branch, then trunk, the one,

the half, other actor, my final

lover and dancing partner over the

sprung stage of the rest of my life,

I am shaving today, so as not, tomorrow,

to seem too eager, like I’d dressed for it,

and tip the hand showing I know the coming suit.

Momentous meetings only carry relative

to the quiet covering them, I find. What kind of

opening line would that be? Hi, would you like

to be silent with me and revel in the hopeful

pregnancy of this newly seeded fruit? Our whole

horizon lines thrown open to time and the mountains’

glacial rise corrugating them? Too heavy, looming.

Hence the panic; hence the grooming.

 

**********

Best Prose

Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views from Poetry Magazine, edited by Fred Sasaki and Don Share. Univ. Of Chicago Press. 240 pages.

Robert Pinsky’s favorite poem project uncovered thousands of readers of poetry, proving poetry’s place in the world is other than Mount Olympus. Now we have essays that present a permanent portfolio of responses to poetry by 50 distinguished individuals who make a living otherwise: actors, musicians, TV personalities, midwives, psychiatrists, military men etc., a spectrum of thought from people who don’t usually think about poetry every day. These “views” were published in Poetry Magazine, features enlisting responses from writers and others outside of the poetry world. I’ve tackled the essays out of order and have more to read, but among my favorites is Jeffrey Brown’s contribution because, well — because he’s one of my favorites — and his inclusion of poetry excerpts are unique to his background in classical studies. That’s the value of this assemblage. Each participant comes from a niche in which time and experience have been served. This book, in granular detail, is evidence that poetry’s a great guide to a wider swath of the population than we knew, and that it is, not only for poets, one of the great rewards in life.

**********

Best Literary Magazine

Little Patuxent Review, edited by Steven Leyva. LPR Enterprises. 133 pages.

This biannual journal features 30 contributors to literature and the arts, this time it’s a Prison Issue. Notable is Ann Bracken’s interview with Betty May a judicial activist working with incarcerated women, using theater arts to let women know who they are. A prose poem by Anthony “Akewi” Barnes demands profound attention for its sound wisdom in “Me and My Younger Self,” where the present-day poet imparts what he’s learned to the person he used to be. Here’s how he ends the three-page prose poem:

It is through your will and

your vision that your future will unfold.

 

Cages are meant for no one. Experience is the teacher that has

no pity. Death once was a name that I called upon each morning.

Today I call for life. Right now you have no vision, thus your

tomorrows are certain to be empty. Luck is for those who’d rather

wait for things to come out of the sky. You must be a man of

decisiveness, for those who fail to plan, plan to fail, for those who

fail to plan, plan to fail.

 

**********

Best Anthology

The Book of Donuts, edited by Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latha. Terrapin Books. 95 pages.

The editors selected 55 poems by 51 poets, which include Denise Duhamel, Jack Bedell, Mira Rosenthal, Martha Silano, Julian Standard, Charles Harper Webb, among them. With all poets singing together — alive, nourishing, rich, they clearly define the range and power of the once humble doughnut. Poetry and confection make for a delicious marriage.

Here’s an excerpt by contributor Jim Daniels “Donuts the Color Of”: “The air smells/like — cold dirt? Factory oil smell/on my hands. Inside, I am careful not to touch the glass/counter while I point at the fat donuts/with thick white cream inside, the ones that are bad/for you, the worst...I inhale the warm dough and coffee. I sit/on a round red stool.…The roads are lined with black-whiskered snow. /How about that? Snow that smells like exhaust. /Exhaustion. Every morning I pass the yellow donut lights — /how can I explain — I'm drawn to the lights…”

ALSO OF NOTE: BEST SPIRITUAL GUIDE

Being Light by Bryan Christopher. Foundation in Light. 159 pages.

Spirit and poetry are never without each other, Christopher writes of “Living in Multidimensional Realities.” Bryan Christopher found words for a place that before had no words. This is a distinctly different book from anything ever I’ve read before. Information, organization and artistry are here. Christopher has a lyrical mind and lets language tell an extraordinary story. A world-class spiritual leader and psychic. An electrifying revelatory book. This is a voice that never existed before. Highly recommended.

**********

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Grace Cavalieri’s new book is Other Voices, Other Lives: A Compendium of Poems, Plays and Interviews (Alan Squire, 2018).

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