A collection of poems featuring interesting metaphor and powerful imagery, touching on love and memory. Book includes the title poem, "Nebulae Cocktails." This poem is a call to subvert the status quo. "We celebrate. We dance... We fill them like empty jars...(we) feed their young with rebellion." The death of a parent is explored in "Memory of Hands" while the collection also includes the humor of the "Tea Party" and "Disenchanted Frogs." Love and loss and identity are compellingly explored.
About the Author: I was born in 1949. I Went to College in Maryland in the 1960's. Wasted my time tipsy on double malt whiskey, idling over the poetry of Robert Bly, which, as I recall, was populated with impotent lumberjacks in those days before the four-hour erection. Needless to say, it was a time of upheaval. I grew up in a world of one-legged men, so full of subtext and back-story, you'd think, from their silence; they were anything but the glorious conquerors of boundless evil. As their son, I listened for some word. Spent entire summers on the beach by the canasta tables, filling their glasses and carrying out the trash, driven only to see fulfilled that look I took for longing. But there would be nothing again in this world to charm them. Eyes turned inward as if to distant beaches. And so, I listened to echoes. Seas in shells. Whispers, so hoarse with their own truth as to speak with the broken voices of the dead, to whom, I was convinced, they too listened. What trains the ear is, mostly, what remains unsaid. You find in halting pauses the novel-length outline shameless truth authors, in mirthless candor and naked clarity. I learned to listen for it. Between the lines of idle chatter and endless card games until, nothing having passed their lips but prayer, I learned what they could not tell me and never would. That time folds, origami-like, upon itself, doing its best to cloak our secrets in silence. Dad died of a heart attack at home in 1961. I remember it still. The whole house exhaled and, as between breaths suspending time. At the funeral, if there was music, it was sound in a vacuum. There were flowers. Were there colors? It was then a firewall fell away, sensation of blood draining, paralysis, a psychic fracture, a rupture not of skin but of spirit. Children who lose a parent suffer deep, invisible wounds. I learned, for some things, there's no repair, fissures of the heart no art can bear. No turning back. No going on. But just as we are broken, we are made new, yet haunted, like lost limbs the memory of hands. I'm 66 this year. Like many of my generation, I never thought I'd live this long. I'm a poet and the father of daughters. I hope to leave them more than hurt and silence. Like my father before me, I'm ready to put down my crazy broken world at the doorsteps of overrated Angels on a casting call with God, prepared to do hand-to-hand combat with the coming of the 360-degrees of silence.