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EATING
EUROPE NOW AVAILABLE!!!! get yours at PARLOR PRESS
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"And don’t you dare set me up as some kind of a
snippy foil just for the sake of narrative
exposition
unless
you say how smart I am and mention my
kicky new hair cut.”
My wife Janet
is really smart and has a kicky
new hair cut.
What begins as a light-hearted
romp
becomes something entirely different.
A narrative divided by world cataclysm,
not in the event, but in its telling...
EATING EUROPE
A Meta-Nonfiction Love Story
Travel Writing may never
recover...
Read Excerpt
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Eating Europe: A Meta-Nonfiction
Love Story
is travel writing
in its most hilarious, poignant,
and consequential form. It is the
year 2000, and Jon
has a grant to write about "the Euro-transitional
era." From Amsterdam to Alsace the
tourist life is
good.
Jon and
Janet
eat and drink and spar with
breezy affection while Jon pays scant attention to
his
project. As they drive on
toward
southern France,
it becomes clear that something has gone very
wrong—both in the journey itself, and in the telling
of the
journey. Jon the author steps in to explain
that he had stopped
writing for three years. In the meantime,
the tragedy of 9/11 and the
drum-beat
of war have changed everything. Janet has launched into peace
activism and
spiraled into depression.
In the very month of the Iraq invasion, at the height of America's
anti-French
hysteria, Jon goes to
France to try to the finish the book. But the ground beneath his story
has
shifted. The gloom of the real
world bleeds into his writing—where it finds parallels in
the pain of
personal
relationship and in
the lies
of every claim of ‘nonfiction.’ In the end, the book strives for
reconciliations: the author to his wife,
the wife
to her character, the author to his work,
the work to
its genre, America to
France. Read Excerpt
BUY THE ART OF COUNTRY GRAIN ELEVATORS: Bottom
Dog Press
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From tin and two-by-fours an elevator grows
and for a span of seasons flourishes,
then withers to dust and blows
away.
That’s the sense of time I’m talking about here.
These are poems that spring from the
ground like fresh seed, but never without
human references. And it is the human
references, in country circumstances, that
make them familiar and understandable to
everyone.
Samuel Hazo
READ
SELECTED POEMS
$14 + S&H. To order:
Bottom Dog Press
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The Art of Country Grain Elevators
My father owned and operated country
grain elevators in rural Nebraska. Working there
during the
summers of my
adolescence influenced who I am--as an artist, as a son. I
have been
working on
these poems for more than twenty years. I was fortunate to be able to team up with
Bruce
Selyem, the premier photographer
and
preservationist of the vanishing world of country
grain elevators. Bruce's
photos--stark, frank, devoid
of
people--offer a haunting setting for my
little poems teeming with human anxieties and
uncertainties. Read Selected Poems
Published
by Bottom Dog Press, as part of its Working Lives Series.
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