Quiet De Luxe Portable: Poems

Abstract

The Swan Painter grapples with how loss, failure, and even minor triumph can lack meaning. These poems document Midwestern roots, growing up in Florida, transplanting to California, and being called back by necessity to gather and preserve what lives in impermanence, as a family dies out. Flowers yield short-blooming moments. A timeline carries us from ancient Greece to the suicide of Robin Williams. Along the continuum of the sixties, filled with music and ruined innocence, Bob Dylan gets redefined as a confidante, his iconic songs in earnest conversation. The San Francisco Bay Area transforms into an unobtainable ideal, alive in clarity and relevance. These poems comment on desires in their most basic form, and the realities that both fade and fuel them.