"The Alphabet of Longing is the distilled essence of a lifetime of poetry about love, light and losses. Tipton's poems are deeply touching. They remind us that yes, there is pain in our lives, but there is also astounding goodness and beauty. These are luminous healing poems to be read over and over." --Isabel Allende The Alphabet of Longing and Other Poems serves as the capstone of James Tipton's long and illustrious career as a poet. Released only days before his death in May, 2018, it marks the first publication of the title poem-which is being recognized as his masterwork-and includes some of his most critically acclaimed and widely anthologized earlier works as well that were also written during "the desert period." A section of tanka, a favorite poem form of the author, concludes this slim volume in an often whimsical way exploring the topics of life, love, and death. In addition to the beautifully designed and packaged text by artist Robert R. Burke, readers are given access to more than 40 minutes of the poet's video readings of the works via QR Codes and URLs. Author's Preface For most of my adult life I have been a beekeeper, or as we still rather quaintly say, a "keeper of bees." For over a decade in Colorado, before moving to Mexico, I made a humble but sweet living through the efforts of the bees and through the grace of the sun and the wealth of desert flowers and the Colorado River which provided water both to me and the bees. It would be more accurate to say the bees were a keeper of me, providing me not only with income in the conventional sense but more importantly those riches and the inspiration that for me come only through long solitude. Indeed, "The Alphabet of Longing" and some of the other poems here arrived at my door only after years of life in the high desert regions of western Colorado. Out of these blessed years came a reconnection to flowers deep inside of me, to secret sources of honey I had almost forgotten, and with this reconnection I discovered how much I loved certain people. Their fragrances still often drift over me in sleep. Early praise for The Alphabet of Longing and Other Poems "It becomes clear within the first poetic lines of James Tipton's newly released collection, The Alphabet of Longing and Other Poems, that the reader is about to embark on a remarkable journey, not only through the letters of the English-language alphabet that provide an ingenious scaffold for the title poem, but also through considerably more than twenty-six facets of human experience, each of them deeply felt and richly rendered." --El Ojo del Lago
About the Author: A descendant of Quakers, Jim Tipton was the embodiment of gentleness, kindness, and fairness-but most of all love. He was a philosopher and practitioner of these values, which came to define him. Tipton was a wanderer and seeker who gravitated to San Francisco in the 1960s and hung out at City Lights Bookstore soaking up the influences of Beat Generation poets. For thirteen years beginning in 1992-2005 he lived a solitary life as a beekeeper in the desert highlands of Colorado, where he studied the minimalist existence of creatures and plants as he searched for answers to what is truly important in life. Although he had written and published poems for many years, it was during this passage that he discovered his most powerful, emotional, and authentic voice in poetry. Tipton published over a thousand poems, short stories, essays, and reviews in journals including The Nation, Southern Humanities Review, American Literary Review, Esquire, International Poetry Review, Modern English Tanka, Modern Haiku, Atlas Poetica, and The Christian Science Monitor. His collection of poems, Letters from a Stranger, with a foreword by Isabel Allende, won the 1999 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, French, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Danish, and Norwegian. In 2005, Tipton moved to the village of Chapala in central Mexico, where he mentored a coterie of promising writers and continued to write and publish. He died at home on May 16, 2018, two weeks after the publication of his last collection of poems, The Alphabet of Longing and Other Poems.