Christopher Conlon (Botswana 1988-90) novel Midnight on Mourn Street published by Earthling Publications in May 2008 has been nominated for The Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association of America. It was nominated in the  category of Superior Achievement in a First Novel. The award will be presented in June, in Burbank, California. Paul Shovlin (Moldova 1996-98) in his PeaceCorpsWriters review compared Conlon to Poe, saying, “[its], an apt comparison, especially in terms of atmosphere, which Conlon is adept at establishing. The feeling of gloom and dark brooding that pervades the novel is one of its strongest points.”

The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has acquired Charles Larson’s (Nigeria 1962-64) collection of African, African-American and Native-American literature.  Larson, a professor at American University, is well known as an authority on African and Third World writers.
     This collection includes signed and inscribed books, rare publications and unique manuscripts and letters. There are more than 1,100 books by African writers, 250 books by African-American and Caribbean writers, and 60 books by Native-American writers.
     “I began reading African writers in 1962 when I was a Peace Corps volunteer,” said Larson.  “It was immediately apparent to me that a rich and exciting literature was emerging across the continent.  My interests expanded when I returned to the United States and discovered similarly important (though sadly overlooked) writing by African-American and American Indian writers.  I feel as if I’ve been in a privileged position to observe so many great writers during what is fast approaching a half century.”
     Larson has edited collections of African writers, going back to 1970, and is  the author of several novels, as well as, academic books.
     Among the documents that Larson has given the library are substantial correspondence with the South Africa/Botswana novelist Bessie Head and the Somali novelist Nuruddin Falah, research material and correspondence with African writers for Larson’s books on African literature and publishing. There is also the manuscript of the unpublished autobiography of popular Nigerian writer Cyprian Ekwensi.
     For anyone who can attend, the University of Texas at Austin is hosting the 2009 Africa History Conference this weekend, March 27-29.   In conjunction with the conference, the Director’s Gallery will host a display of materials from the Ransom Center’s African literature collection, including manuscripts and correspondence by Head, Mazisi Kunene, Es’kia Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka, historical materials dating back to the Second Boer War and audio recordings of Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Okot p’Bitek and Joe de Graft. The Director’s Gallery, on the third floor of the Ransom Center.

For anyone who has traveled or hopes to travel to this lesser known corner of Central Asia’s ancient Silk Road, Roaming Kyrgzstan’s cover photo captures some of the magic that lies within this mountain nation’s truly majestic and rugged landscapes. 

Roaming Kyrgyzstan: Beyond the Tourist Track
by Jessica Jacobson (Senegal 1997)
IUniverse,Inc.,
November 2008
216 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Catherine Varchaver (PC Staff, Kyrgyzstan 1995-97)

For anyone who has traveled or hopes to travel to this lesser known corner of Central Asia’s ancient Silk Road, Roaming Kyrgzstan’s cover photo captures some of the magic that lies within this mountain nation’s truly majestic and rugged landscapes.

Turning past the seductive cover, the reader encounters something not unlike Kyrgyzstan’s cities and towns-a richness of content and culture hidden beneath a distractingly unsophisticated and even off-putting presentation. Kyrgyzstan’s natural topography ranges from exotic to breath-taking, but the Soviet influence on local architecture erased a good bit of the visible, traditional charm in the populated areas.  Soviet style concrete block architecture is a turn off, but if you can get past that, there is a world worth getting to know behind the cinder block facades.

One of the downsides of self-publishing is the lack of professional editing and formatting. For those of us who are visually sensitive, the ’80’s typewriter style headings in this guide, all underlined, with indented informational paragraphs detract from the short but reasonably informative travel guide listings organized by regions. The photos inside are poor quality and the one map too small to be useful.

That said, Jessica Jacobson’s experience living in Kyrgyzstan gives life to this guide as she reveals a true familiarity with the facets of life and a people as only a former Peace Corps Volunteer can.  As the back cover bio tells us, Jacobson is fluent in Russian and spent two and a half years doing some undisclosed work in Kyrgyzstan. She clearly soaked up the cross-cultural plenty in this former Soviet nation where you see Russian men at bus stops squatting alongside ethnic Kyrgyz (or Kazak, Uzbek, Uigur, Tatar); and Kyrgyz shepherd families pouring small bowls of hot tea from Russian samovars outside traditional wool yurts. While city-dwellers may be modernizing in many ways, Kyrgyz country folk still drink fermented mare’s milk and live beneath snow-capped mountains in the north; while in the south, you find camels instead of horses and desert heat at the edges of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan instead of lush greenery or snow.

To her credit, Jacobson raises her travel guide to a higher level with 12 journal-like vignettes strewn throughout that detail a variety of encounters and cultural observations.  She paints a colorful picture of life in this complex, multi-ethnic country and manages to infuse her narratives with historical and personal detail.  The final result is interesting but only up to a point. The writing is ultimately uneven and conjures little in the way of emotion or socio-political ah-hah’s.

Coming from an author who was a Peace Corps Volunteer (Senegal ‘97), I expected more of a chatty, this-is-what-you-can-expect-if-you-visit narrative style.  The fact that Jacobson is fluent in Russian means that she’s never had the experience of traveling in Kyrgyzstan without being able to communicate with most locals. Maybe that’s why this guide doesn’t focus much on how to deal with communication issues you might encounter, especially once you leave the capital, Bishkek.

And for anyone who truly wants to experience the beauty and mystical mountain energies of this faraway Silk Road squiggle on the map, there is one mystifying omission. While it appears that Roaming Kyrgyzstan’s basic information and listing of places to stay, restaurants, and travel services are reasonably comprehensive, Shepherd’s Way Trekking (www.kyrgyztrek.com) is not included.  This superb horseback trekking service creates a unique tourist experience.  Run by a former English teacher, Ishen, also the son of a traditional Kyrgyz falcon hunter (like the one on the book’s cover), and his wife, Gulmira,  Shepherd’s Way offers over a dozen one- to 12-day full-service horseback trips that attract travelers from around the globe to explore the wonders of the Tien Shan or Mountains of Heaven.

So… Roaming Kyrgyzstan might be a guide worth tucking into a large suitcase for some side reading, but don’t forget to make sure you’ve put that Lonely Planet Guide in your carry-on bag.

Catherine Varchaver  spent several years on Peace Corps staff working as a desk officer, trainer and Associate Peace Corps Director for Education at Headquarters and overseas.  For the last ten years, she has worked in private practice, Body and Soul Nutrition, blending Eastern meets Western approaches to health.  Catherine’s blog on this website is Health: Holistically Speaking.

An RPCV writer who has published many, many successful books is writing one now on people who never seem to get sick. He is looking to interview them and he asked me if there is anyone in the community who while overseas discovered ways or herbs or methods that have kept them healthy. If you know of anyone let me know. Thanks.

In the early years of the Peace Corps, the agency provided each household of Volunteers with a book locker. The books were meant to provide leisure reading for the PCVs, and then to be left behind in schools, villages, and towns where the Volunteers served. There is some mystery as to who had the idea for the book lockers; one rumor has it that it came from first Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver’s wife, Eunice.
Surely those books were a wonderful resource to any of the PCVs who thought of writing about the incomparable life they were living.
Since 1961 PCVs and Peace Corps Staff have been writing the story of their lives in the developing world, as well as writing about the world beyond the Peace Corps. Among the more than 1000 writers  who have served in the Peace Corps have written and published their books. Many of the books have been about the experience, others are travel books, works of fiction, and academic studies.
So, with a nod to the famous Peace Corps Book Locker, our site is offering Peace Corps writers the opportunity to have their books featured on the Book Locker.
In the days ahead we will list books of all types: novels, non-fiction, poetry, photography, essays, self-help, Peace Corps experience, books that have nothing to do with the Peace Corps - both commercial and self-published and available for sale.
If you are interested in joining the Book Locker and featuring your books for sale, let me know. Meanwhile check out the first books that are now up on the site.

BOOK REVIEW
Larry Lihosit discovered the Peace Corps Writers site a couple years back and has been sending his book our way for reviews and comments. Larry is ‘outside’ the main current of literature and commercial publishing and has successful published his own books of poetry and travel. He is proof that you do not need an agent, a big name, or connections to find your way into print. It is for that reason that we have him writing a column on this site. Here is a review of one of his books of poetry to prove that like all good writers, he can take criticism as well as give it.

Attack of the Claw and Other Poems about Teaching
by Lawrence F. Lihosit ( Honduras 1975–77)
A Book Company 2008
(Purchase book from publisher)

Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79)

For several years running, my sons have participated in the National Guild Auditions, in which out-of-state pianists-from, say, Colorado or California-fly in to evaluate local Kentucky piano students.  Until students begin playing intermediate repertoire, they are inevitably placed in the “Circle of Family and Friends”-a judgment that is not at all synonymous with failure, but rather with nascent piano skills and the forbearance of lots of parents and grandparents in the audience.  How adorable that his or her feet don’t reach the floor when he or she sits down to play the melody line of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” switching off between right and left hands!

I would place Lawrence F. Lihosit in the Peace-Corps-writer equivalent of the “Circle of Family and Friends.”  His poetry skills are nascent.  Ignorance is bliss.  He doesn’t knowwhat he doesn’t know–if it’s in lines, it must be a poem.  Still, Lihosit will hear some people, albeit not poets, clapping in the audience, mostly fellow teachers (or ex-teachers, like Lihosit himself) who have had it up to here with No Child Left Behind.

It so happens that on behalf of poetry, I am sympathetic to their cause. When my younger son entered fourth grade, my family hit a wall with NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND.   Maybe it was all the worksheets on changing similes to metaphors.  Maybe it was the fact that all the similes were really clichés anyway-cool as a cucumber, proud as a peacock, etc.-so they were being changed into deadmetaphors.  Maybe it was the new requirement that students do “graphic organizers” of poems instead of reading them aloud.  I don’t know, but it still pains my heart when I remember how my son-who never met a volume of poems by Shel Silverstein or Douglas Florian or Nancy Willard he didn’t want to read indefatigably at bedtime-came home spitting bullets about how much he hated poetry.

Lihosit admits in a preface, “Teaching is hard work.  It just didn’t pay enough.  So when a grade school principal offered me a contract to teach fifth grade, I ambled off in another direction.  Any cowboy who says he ain’t been throwed is a liar.” Attack of the Claw is at once Lihosit’s paean to the classroom he left behind and his dire warning about what schools are becoming thanks to federal law, which he characterizes variously as “a giant ripsaw” and “a paddle to beat our kids for a higher score.” Officials charged with improving scores page through dossiers “like giant raptors/hunched over bleeding prey.”

On the one hand, we’ve heard it all before (i.e., the jeremiads about sixth-graders who read on a second-grade level, about the broken promises of charter schools, about the educational deficits of foisting a competitive business model onto the public schools). On the other hand, on any battleground, there’s always room for a poet of witness. Lihoset is not that poet of witness, and the most he manages is the occasional interesting report from the front, as in “Feet Tapping,” where the speaker/teacher tests out “dead white guy orchestration” (read classical music) as a pedagogical tool, or as in “Change,” where he describes books and studies on the public schools “like rows of night creams next to the sleeping, sagging czar.” There are also moments of good fun, as in the title poem:

I winced my face
Like a giant pickle
Shook my claw
To hand

We all laughed
Practiced holding pencils
With hands
Not claws.

In terms of poetics, it’s like Lihoset took a video camera into the public schools and shot anything and everything.  “Thank you for reading to us/There’s a boy/in the girls’ bathroom,” reads “Thank You Note 2 For Student Teacher.”  In the reels and reels of unsophisticated footage, Lihoset got a few lucky takes.

ANN NEELON is the author of Easter Vigil, which won the Anhinga Prize for poetry.  Her poems have appeared most recently in Poetry Southeast.  She edits New Madrid journal and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Murray State University. In a prior life, she taught high school for five years. She also taught the equivalent of seventh and eighth grades while in Senegal in the Peace Corps.

Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, and a writer for The New Yorker, will be talking about “Writing in China” on Friday, March 20, at an anthropology conference in Santa Fe.  He will be speaking at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. Peter is scheduled for a session that begins at noon on Friday in the Sweeney Room of the Center. The session is open to the public. When you get to the Convention Center ask directions at the Registration Desk in the Lobby.  And try and hang around and say hello to Peter, tell him you’re also an RPCV.

BOOK REVIEW
If  you have read anything about Bernie Madoff, the $65 billion swindler, who took most of the fortunes of his good friends in Palm Beach (and elsewhere) in the giant Ponzi scheme he operated since the early ’90s, you’ll appreciate this book on his Palm Beach crowd. Written by RPCV Larry Leamer the book was published just weeks before Bernie the Bandit went down.

Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach
by Laurence Leamer (Nepal 1965-67)
Hyperion 2009

Reviewed by Richard Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64)

Laurence Leamer has written gossipy books about the Kennedys and Arnold Schwarzenegger that have brought some actual thought to celebrity-mongering.  Now he has come up with an exercise in commercial star-fuckery, dull-withered-rich-people division, that some of his readers may find considerably less alluring than his takes on Jackie and Ethel.  Others might cruise through this stuff with a certain horrified delectation.  Put me down in the first category.

While Leamer’s title suggests a true-crime approach to his material, the book is less Vincent Bugliosi than Anthony Trollop.  The customs and mores of the dessicated Palm Beach rich are examined with an unsparing exactitude, even when they aren’t doing anything as interesting as shooting their wives or smashing their girlfriends’ faces in.  Here’s the biggest mystery in the book: if Leamer is so repulsed by a municipality that harbors some of the ghastliest bigots and spoiled ignoramuses in America, why does he choose to live there part of the year?  He offers no clue.

Palm Beach, Leamer reports, has been a warm-weather refuge for the American super-rich since the late 19^th century.  Henry Flagler’s railroads made the site accessible, and Addison Mizner’s Spanish-Moroccan architecture gave it a public aesthetic.  Mizner is one of the Palm Beach personages that Leamer plunks down in his wandering narrative.  The “sick, rotund” architect built the monumental mansions, hotels and private clubs that turned Palm Beach into “an exquisite, timeless, sophisticated enclave.”

Sophisticated is the wrong word.  By Leamer’s own description, shallow is more like it.  Both the old WASP aristocracy—real estate tycoons, oil barons, the Listerine heiress, et al—and the more recently arrived Jews (who inhabit a section of town the WASPS call “the Gaza Strip”), as well as such late-coming riff-raff as Donald Trump, are all animated by just one goal: social-climbing.  They go to parties and balls and they decorate their houses and themselves, and they don’t do much else.  How “sophisticated” is that?  Oh, and they are nearly all Republicans.  Those few denizens with liberal concerns—a few Jews mainly—learn early to keep their mouths shut politically.

Over the course of his narrative, Leamer takes us inside lots of grotesquely over-produced charity balls and parties.  There are recitations of menus and descriptions of gowns, trophy spouses and eye lifts.  We learn that Eric Purcell is “an intriguing conversationalist,” though we never hear him say anything intriguing.  Brownie McLean “reigns over” a “superficial society given over to pleasure and amusements.”  Leamer leads us through his pal Brownie’s succession of marriages to wealthy men, and while Leamer spends an inordinate amount of time visiting with Brownie—as does the reader—Leamer never conveys what her attraction is.  The only thing interesting about Brownie is her money.  (Some of you are saying, “Duh.”)

Leamer does have the acuity—and the dramatic sense—to be amused by Palm Beach’s Jay Gatsby-like figures, both male and female.  A goodly number of the townsfolk emerged from humble beginnings and their outsized personalities were invented out of not much.  They set out to marry money, and in a society where superficiality is everything screwing your way to riches is a piece of cake.  It is some of those tales, however, that do have a way of leading to the madness and bloodshed of Leamer’s title.  Fred Keller, who shot his wife in cold blood, chose to commit murder to avoid handing over half his fortune to a woman he came to regard correctly as a gold digger.  One of several instances where Leamer steps in and participates in the story he is telling is his series of prison visits with the unrepentant Keller. Leamer, however, fails in his attempt to help the killer find “closure.”

It seemed that by the time Leamer was nearly finished writing this book, he was pretty much up to his hairline with the glittering triviality of it all, and so he added a postscript about a couple of Palm Beach’s “nice” people.  When Pauline Pitt’s divorced friend died young from breast cancer, Pauline took in the woman’s adopted seven-year-old and raised her lovingly.  There are precious few others you admire when you put down this compendium of shiny but dumb lives.  Among the most memorable of the strivers here is the woman who believed that her life would be forever enriched by marrying a Jew who didn’t identify as Jewish and taking her vows in the presence of Prince Philip.  Oy vey.

Richard Lipez (Ethiopia 1962-64; Washington 1964-67) writes the Don Strachey private eye novels under the name Richard Stevenson. Death Vows was published in September 2008. Lipez is a former editorial writer at The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, MA. His journalism and fiction have appeared in many publications, and he reviews mysteries for The Washington Post.  He lives in Becket, MA and is married to sculptor Joe Wheaton.

BOOK REVIEW
Roland Merullo who served in Micronesia back in the day has written a political book that is “right on” when it comes to what is happening in Washington today. And Matt Losak, who served as a PCV in Lesotho, and later worked  as an advance man for President Clinton,  reviews the book for our site. You might say it is a match made in heaven, or…

American Savior
by Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979-80)
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008

Reviewed by Matt Losak (Lesotho 1985-88)

So, you’re thinking we may have just elected the ideal candidate for President of the United States:  he’s black and white and well-read all over, he’s good looking, he’s from everywhere U.S.A. and possesses a political mind that synthesizes the nation’s best visionary thought into today’s kitchen-table problem solving. But in Roland Merullo’s, American Savior, there comes along a third-party candidate, or, should I say, then comes along the second coming of a very special candidate who manages to top them all and his name is Jesus Christ. At least that’s the set up for this fun and sardonic novel where we are treated to the dream campaign of every closet idealist in a novel of divine politics.

Now I have to say that I come from the combined perspective of jaded RPCV (and I was jaded before I went into the Peace Corps!) and overweight, cigar-smoking political hack. So, in many ways, I am extremely vulnerable to the seduction of a story like this. Not that I haven’t experience a kind of divine politics of my own.

As an advanceman in the Clinton White House, I remember standing guard over a pen of about 300 hungry reporters as the President, holding the multi-colored hands of a half-dozen children, crossed a south Texas high school stadium field, four school bands madly blaring Ruffles and Flourishes followed by Hail to the Chief as though their country depended on them, thousands cheering wildly. Clinton, white haired and aglow in the beginning of his second term, alighted the stage like an athlete and stood at the podium with such charismatic radiance that even the bomb-sniffing dogs stood like pointers. Now the set up for an event like this takes about 7 days of advance work by hundreds of people, so when the President’s speech lifted up from the podium and swirled like feathers into the clouds, we all gasped. And for a very dangerous moment I thought this would be my chance to help out Bill by chasing down the white sheets, but I thought the better of it. Good thing too, because this was no average politician. Clinton began without skipping a beat, “Let me tell what was on all those pieces of paper.” And without skipping a word, or an opportunity to embellish brilliantly, he outlined to a wholly converted audience why national service, including the Peace Corps, was one of America’s best investments in a strong democracy. That was the closest thing to divine politics I had ever seen. But that was real life, and Bill, of course, was no Jesus Christ.

In American Savior,we are treated to a whirl-wind campaign story of its own that begins with the one of our most cynical types–a local television news reporter–sent to the worst side of town to cover the story of a ghetto boy who has fallen from a third-story tenement balcony to his death, at least until he is touched on the shoulder by a nice guy happening by.  Sent to cover another so-called miracle of an inexplicably cured child similarly touched by the mysterious “Good Visitor” at the local children’s hospital, Russ Thomas begins to get the feeling that the miracle worker may be the real thing. In short order, and against every sensibility of our lead character’s rich cynicism and resistance to faith and folly, we are drawn ineluctably deeper into the excitement and hope of the campaign of the millennia. Because, after all, wouldn’t it be totally cool if it were true?

Merullo anticipates his readers’ objections to this fantasy tale by developing characters who intelligently express them for us just as we arrive at them. How many times have you thought, “Oh, come on, he’d never do that…” before putting the book down, or rising to buy popcorn. In American Savior, Merullo heads us off at the pass.  When Thomas meets Jesus for the first time at an Italian restaurant he is fully prepared to endure the pleadings of a delusional. Hearing Jesus’s story, and his request to quit his job and join the campaign, Thomas leaves the meeting suggesting that Jesus prove who he is by sending his next message in a dream, “That’s the way they did it in the old days,” he says with not too little sarcasm. Jesus does not disappoint.

If your first objection to a story like this is that it’s a Christian story, oh ye of little faith, fear not. Merullo adroitly covers the bases through one character or another. Russ Thomas, the son of a devoutly Catholic mother and working-class Jewish father, is possessed of a sarcastic, smart-ass persona he’s developed over the years to protect himself from his life’s considerable pain and dashed hopes. Thomas’s Down syndrome brother and psychiatrist girlfriend-who, by the way, has penchant for sexual role play that even Jesus finds amusing, only intensifies Thomas’s character. Through Thomas, and a wonderful cast of characters that range from gangland toughs to born-again fanatics, cops and robbers, the loving and the violent, we are able to launch our criticism of the whole idea of Jesus on earth and his candidacy, but are swept along by a story that takes one of history’s most important characters and give us the irresistible opportunity to walk him through a modern world of troubles, asking his opinion and advice. Fun like this just hasn’t been had since Captain Kirk and Spock navigated the streets of San Francisco in search of whales.

For the closet idealist, RPCV or no, who is still waiting for that perfect leader who understands truth and justice in a complex world, American Savior gives a Jesus we can root for, not too defined, not too clearly opinionated, but smart, funny and good looking. What’s not to like? The fact that you already know what’s going to happen won’t stop you from turning the pages.

Matt Losak is the communications director at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland.

BOOK REVIEW
Sandra Meek (Botswana 1989-91), associate professor of English, rhetoric and writing at Berry College, has been awarded the largest book-publication prize for poetry in the United States for her third collection of poems, Biogeography. The Dorset Prize consists of a $10,000 cash for the author and a guarantee of national and international distribution for the winning entry. Biogeography was released by Tupelo Press in spring 2008.

Over the years Sandra has published in many of the poetry magazines, including Poetry, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review and Prairie Schooner. Twice, she has been recognized with the Georgia Author of the Year Award for poetry by the Georgia Writers Association, first for Nomadic Foundations (2003) and later for Burn (2006).

Her new book is reviewed by Tony Zurlo, (Nigeria 1964-65) a poet and long time supporter and reviewer for Peace Corps Writers.

Biogeography
by Sandra Meek (Botswana 1989-91)
Dorset, VT: Tupelo Press, 2008.

Reviewed by Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1964-65)

Sandra Meek’s first book of poems, Nomadic Foundations, won the 2003 Peace Corps Writers Award for Poetry and the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee. And her most recent book, Biogeography, won the $10,000 Dorset Prize for poetry.

So, everyone should read this new book, right? If you’re ready for an intellectually challenging, time-consuming project, definitely. But beware, Biogeography is not for the meek (pun semi-intended). These poems are complex, often shifting from images of car wrecks to gray and cloudy landscapes.

Biogeography reminds me that humans stubbornly cling to our belief that we are the center of  creation. Meek provides powerful images of the our struggle for identity and meaning, but images that inevitably litter the environment with our material wreckage.

Several excellent poems portray this bewildering mystery of life and death. Comparing her own fate in a car wreck to that of a friend’s mother who lies in a coma, the narrator says: “What sound does the soul make / leaving the body? And how distinguish it / from the machine’s pump and sigh, from steel / crashing against steel? But we walked // away from our wreck, days before the call / that she’d been hit….” (”Coma”).

One of my favorites is “Passage,” about the narrator’s plane landing in Port au Prince, Haiti, for refueling. It contains all of the best qualities of her poetry: precise description, the beauty of the natural environment, human exploitation of the land, and the surreal quality of her visit. Protected inside “our aluminum skin we can /rise over the forest to view / that tattered green.” As they depart, the island “blurred below.” The narrator sees only

the blindfold of shadow
flickering like a raven flying just below

the island’s skin, a root ripped up in one
fluid motion so the black soil hidden deep

below this exhaustion, overturned,
briefly rises, then Haiti

is swallowed again, sealed
by a roof of clouds which clears to a chain

of unnamed islands, earth’s knobbed spine,
knuckles of white sand, stranded.

Some of the poetry is complicated by references to essays from scholarly writings with difficult technical terminology. “Camera Obscura” is a poem “made up of words and phrases from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘Nature’.”

Another poem, “Idolum Naturae Magnum: A Meditation,” according to Meek, “is made entirely of words and phrases from John B. Gorman’s Philosophy of Animated Existence, or, Sketchs of Living Physics with Discussions Physiology Philosophical, to Which is Added a Brief Medical Account of the Middle Regions of Georgia.”

Sandra Meek is not an easy poet to read. Be prepared for a serious meditation on the relationship between the neutral world of geology and people’s struggle to survive in this changing world. Like most complicated writings, the rewards for sticking to the reading is high. There are moments of immediate insight. The last poem “The Supposed Degeneracy of Animated Nature in America” in many ways points to a major theme: natural change is the way of the world, and humans are just a one small part of this world.

Tony’s poetry and fiction have appeared in more than one hundred print and online journals. His newest publications include fourteen poems in the anthology In These Latitudes: Ten Contemporary Poets, ed. Robert Bonazzi, Wings Press, 2008; a short story “Marco’s Marcoroni” in the anthology, Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana, Fordham U P, 2008; and a book  of poems about China titled The Mind Dancing, Plain View Press, 2009, with calligraphy and art by his wife, Vivian Lu.