New Releases
A Guest In All Your Houses order here
In
this highly evocative first collection, award-winning poet Peter Ludwin
explores themes of history and culture, as well as the power of land
and place to shape aesthetic vision. Set entirely in the
American
West from the Great Basin to the Great Plains, this is a book with a
strong spiritual core. By turns meditative and freewheeling,
it
reflects the joy and passion of being engaged with a beckoning
world. As the title suggests, the poet approaches his subject
in
all its manifest diversity with the outlook of a privileged guest for
whom each experience is never sufficient just for itself.
Rather,
these encounters are signposts on a path to a world sustained by
invitation and a poet's deft interpretation of the road.a chaos of angels order here
"There is no Gene for the Human Spirit"
A clever tag from the 1997 film Gattaca is a statement which each of us knows inherently to be true. If you’ve read the startling portrayal of a utopian society gone wrong in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), you are acquainted with the author’s prophetic predictions of a world addicted to chemically driven happiness. In a culture where biochemistry has become its own religion, spirituality is being replaced by serotonin manipulation and mood enhancers.
The idea was conceived over two years ago when the editors of Chaos perceived the alarming rate of family and friends on psychotropics. They launched a simple ad in Poets & Writers magazine under the previous title Pill Blues, asking poets to send in their works. The response was significant, culminating in a collection of poems from over 60 poets (with contributors from as far as England and Czechoslovakia) artfully voicing their protests.
This fascinating anthology hosts a broad perspective; housewives, doctors, ex-patients, psychoanalysts, professors, and mothers, even a contribution from a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist. Not to be drummed down by the oppressive beat of protest, there are other tones integrated into the anthology, buoyant explosive prose aimed at the essential self—that which transcends physical life as we know it. The back of the book contains a healthy list of references where readers can go to learn more about alternative solutions to drug therapy. A Chaos of Angels is no panacea—it is a combined voice demanding to be noticed and asking us to discover a viable means of change without having to reach into the shallow confines of our medicine cabinet.