Dear Reader,
Books, especially poetry collections, are hard-won things. They take time, effort, and countless hours of care. Then after hours of work, you send them off into the world to be judged, scrutinized, and analyzed, your private world laid bare for anyone with access to the internet or a local bookstore. But, sometimes, when the stars align, and the fates are kind, a book appears out of nowhere, fully formed, like finding a child at your doorstep, a gift sans the rigors of pregnancy and the agony of labor.
That’s how this chapbook, Like Falling Leaves, came about.
I’ve spent the past few months toiling away on my novel and working on getting a new publisher for my third full-length collection. It’s bone-crushing soul-sucking work. One requires intense focus and insight, and the other requires tenacity and boldness, all of which I am in short supply of. After editing ground to a halt and the manuscript shopping turned into months of waiting (with some promising words from one or two perspective publishers), I needed a break. I needed a creative outlet that was short and sweet, and to the point, something that would allow me to keep my pen sharp and my mind fresh without demanding too much of me. I began writing short stories, but that quickly became draining as the stories got longer and more involved. I needed something else.
It was about that time I began to reread Dharma Bums and through Japhy, the free-wheeling, mountain-climbing, Zen bhikku, that I fell back in love with the work of Gary Snyder. It was spending time with Gary that I was drawn to the haiku, and the short poems that dominate Hitch Haiku and Danger on Peaks. Inspired by these short, punchy image-rich poems, I began to write my own, and soon I found myself writing at least one a day.
So here you have it, a short chapbook, a product of a creative rut, a reminder that dead ends are in the end, imaginary, and that silence, for all its daunting immensity, is, in reality, “an intense roar.”
*I’ve provided a link to Barnes and Noble in lieu of Amazon, one because Amazon is sadly killing the publishing industry, though even I find it hard not to turn to it in times of dire crisis, and two because the distributor is stilling setting up the book at other retailers. As always, if you enjoy it, please leave a review, and if you can, recommend it to a friend. It’s a quick, enjoyable read and great for people who don’t normally read poetry.