Perpetual Arrivals, an E-book of poems

 PERPETUAL ARRIVALS

You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/331048

These poems were written throughout the nineties before global economics, cellphones, the Internet, and fears of terrorism became commonplace. It was a time of exciting change, the former USSR having collapsed and much of Eastern Europe suffering painful yet hopeful upheavals. In the U.S., jobs were plentiful and soldiers weren’t being shipped off to foreign wars in large numbers. As a younger man, I suffered the delusion of thinking it would always be this way. I kept furious journals, wanting to blend my experiences of West meeting East, and to capture the up-tempo, ground-breaking, sometimes hedonistic spirit of those times. I’ve weaved the U.S. poems like strands of DNA through the poems about the former USSR, and Romania. The book is structured in quadrants based on the four seasons, and the primary directions of any compass. I’ve prefaced each quadrant with a quotation from an author I was absorbed in at that time. As far as arrivals are concerned, I’m inclined to say I’ve never gotten there, but I’ve experienced small plateaus and perceptions that have helped me define better an ultimate destination other than death – if there is one. Looking back, the nineties seem an insouciantly naïve and selfish decade that marked the end of a long and familiar romantic attachment, and the start of something frighteningly new. Like many arrivals, I suppose.