A collaboration with John Bloomberg-Rissman

(Moria Books / Locofo Chaps, Chicago, 2017)

A free .pdf read is available at the publisher’s site HERE.

A Print Copy is available for $5.00 at the publisher’s LULU account HERE.

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Review:

With lines like Absence is a singe and But love is also / a source of difficulty words may not be adequate to express the depth of emotion that these lines convey. It is enough to leave them be.

Comprehending Mortality—a title which calls to mind Wordsworth’s ode Intimations of Immortality (written from a somewhat different perspective)—is a sustained reflection on the state of being subject to death. The cover art of a bronze object “Owl on a Frog” [ca. 1620] cast in Austria but housed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Jack and Belle Linsky Collection, 1982, is a fitting illustration of how frogs fall prey to owls and how death comes to all of us at the end of our lives.

In the end it is our fragility and the vulnerability of our planet that is our Achilles heel. We need that encaustic—that preservative wax—to protect the fragility of paper. Recommended.

—Neil Leadbeater, Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement), June 2018

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The project is dedicated to Eileen Tabios’ magnificent dog Achilles (2003-2017).