Additional information
by Geoffrey O'Brien (Author)
Each of these poems is some sort of story about stories. A crowded city undergoes a spell of enforced confinement. In a war of rumors and conspiracy theories, identities are stolen and shapeshifting outsiders infiltrate urban parks. New fiefdoms consolidate under the sign of pervasive unease. A landscape of dry rivers and toxic weeds reveals itself. Within the zone of isolation, all the stories play out again in the mind, through memory or dream or unexpected waking flash-spectral trespasses, plays staged in empty theaters, messages concealed in drowned books, lives that might have been lived but weren't, hermetic histories, lost paradises continuing to unreel in a subterranean screening room. The stories hang at last on a thread of melody, resolving themselves into a connecting filament that persists even at the core of silence.
SAMPLE POEM:
The Bed
There are moments
when the sun is nothing
orange glow
staining a blank wall
and the dying see doorways
not visible to others
but cannot enter them
or even stir from the bed
where they beat their hands
against the barrier
