Amazon review: Fascinating & Beautiful; . . . & I'm grateful.

Five Stars, here's an excerpt from the first Amazon review: "Fascinating and beautiful book written thoughout with intensity. . . not like a French prose poem. . . but with the effect of poetry. . . I was enthralled from beginning to end."

I like to think Che is more sustained than the French prose poems I've admired.

The Reader's Potentials: Well-known translator's take on Che.

A friend & translator writes, "still, and again, engrossed in the masterfulness of 'Che' language. It is a rare thing in prose
these days that a writer does not write 'to the reader' but to the art of creating something that makes a reader re-visit his own potentials."

Of course I'm grateful for what's said there.

Re-reading the epigraphs to section three, Acolyte, this morning I realized, again, just how important those are to the text--and revealing in the order and way in which they amount. I hope they are "permission" and "affinity" both, and more. I read them as a kind of Greek Chorus, preluding each section of Che.

Hadestown benefit for Harbor Mountain Press: Blew Minds to Venus, Honey.

Stunned and amazed in front of Anais Mitchell's--and Michael Chorney's, Geza Carr, Nelson Caldwell & Polly Vanderputten [double frig' cellos!!], Rob Morse, Adam Moss and Andrew Moroz's--spot-lit amped and nuanced acoustical performance of their thumpin' rag-time jazzy rock musical, with impeccable drawn-in woodsy campfire storytelling execution & cunning acts of redemption, sultry-felt enlivening, in their folk opera, Hadestown, Saturday at Town Hall Theater in Woodstock, VT. Every note, every knee wiggle & wag, drum lean & upright bass sag in the shadow of rim of stage light, each sound fired from a myth that's part of everyone. Somehow this has a lot to do with _Che._, I feel it skin to skin, sure as sun dries what yesterday's showers left--this springing. Damn, May's fine. . . .

P.S. Thanks BTC Bend Oregon!

Left Bank reading & reviews, comments & my "clarification"

Recent readers compare the experience to Marilynne Robinson and William Gass. (I went out and got a book by Robinson to see.)

Let me just say: the "double hyphen dash" and the regular solid strike dash are used in my text with reason. Pacing and utterance have to do with it.

And regarding epigraphs: the choices and the placement/phrasing/crediting are every bit as important to the text as the text. What allows the text and what supports the text is universal, but it is all personal. Flux and form: equal parts important. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.

See you at Manchester and The Mountain on Friday.

Thanks to all who bought the book at Southern New Hampshire University and Left Bank Books Saturday & Tuesday.

April Events

I'll be at Left Bank Books, Hanover NH, Tuesday April 20th w/ Andrea Cohen, 7:30
Then: April 17 11am SNHU for NHWP festival and
April 23 & 24 at VT's Manchester Literary Fest.
On the 27th I host for the Norwich Bookstore at NPL.
Come on by!

The "Green" Che.

I'm calling it "my Green Che"--not only because the cover is green [green fountain pen, green beret, green tint covering] but because, in a word, the book is about renewal: textually, emotionally, intellectually, politically, economically (oh yes, the gift economy. . . ; liberates the combo Green Money, yes?). Our own revolutions must be Green now, yes? Characters Mali and Fenton and Uncle, especially, go about what they do in this daily context, travelers of "the beyond" that they are. May our evolutions enliven. Be Green As Possible, friend to friend, eh Che?

unsung literary heroes

I've been sorting books in my office in preparation for a talk. The best things come to me this way, often. Here are four more books that surprised me, rock me, and in one way or another captivate me. Not one of them is well known; even Hugh Kenner's was found in a pile of remainders at The St. Mark's bookstore (many years ago), far under-priced: _We bark at Midnight_, by Van Lane Ferguson (Tuttle, Rutland VT and Tokyo Japan); _Daughters Of Memory_, by Peter Najarian (City Miner, Berkeley); _A Homemade World_, by Hugh Kenner (Marion Boyars, London); and _Red_, by Melanie Braverman (Perugia, Florence Massachusetts). I see Melanie Braverman on the flats in Provincetown every other summer or so. It is a wonder that such writing of simplicity and torque comes from, also, the quiet of standing--or submerged in--the few remaining inches of tide, ebbing or oncoming, in gentle conversation. This is the seed that floats from India to Ireland, from Italy to Haiti. We are made more of what we become by drift.