Just In Case It Isn’t There – Postcards from Elsewhere by R. Nemo Hill

$24.00

Why postcards? Well, even before I acquired the blank book into which many of the details of these short pieces were recorded, I was sketching them out in numerous postcards to friends and acquaintances back home. And thus, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my many correspondents for providing me, initially, with concrete destinations for these reflections on my travel experiences. As the years passed, and my trips to Bali continued, there emerged this project of creating a collection of these musings, and yet many of them were still begun as snail-mail postcards, subsequently transcribed and modified into my daily journal, and then expanded or contracted at home in New York City where I used their scribbled details as a memory tool to recreate and preserve moments otherwise ephemeral.

Description

  • Kind: Perfectbound
  • Pages: 254
  • Language: English
  • Date Published: April, 2022
  • ISBN: 978-1-953252-47-0

Praise

This is a book of impressions. Rats run over the heads of unsuspecting diners, a man naps on a coffin lid. The Bali rice harvest whispers. Tropical heat stultifies and rain freezes. We witness over time the changes wrought by globalization and modernization, including the arrival of TV, and know the writer is a poet by his sensibility, the very turn of his sentences. This is R. Nemo Hill’s Book of Disquiet, composed of fragments, observations, musings, quotations, postcards, all colored by particular places, sensations, yearnings, revelations. In Elizabeth Bishop’s words, everything is “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’” Yet, as is the case with Bishop, there is a guiding spirit, in this case a man named “No one,” a traveler, inbound and outbound at the same time. —David Mason

Excerpt

The Heat

8 March, 1991—Andong, Bali—

In a recurring fantasy I am painting pictures of figures with halos. ‘It’s the heat,’ I suppose—classic tropical disclaimer—turning even ordinary folk into radiant hyper-ventilating saints, forging an individual nimbus, golden, glowing, for each of the ants busy hauling and hoisting likewise luminous crumbs across the furnace of my porch. It’s the heat shimmer, of course—the bright trembling shadow of equatorial everything.

Author

R. Nemo HillR. Nemo Hill is the author of a novel, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane, 2002) a poem based on a story by H. P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music Of Erich Zann (Hippocampus, 2004), and three books of poetry from Dos Madres Press, When Men Bow Down (2012), In No Man’s Ear (2016) and Magellan’s Reveries (2018) He is editor and publisher of EXOT Books, at exotbooks.com.

He lives like an aging landlocked sailor in the Catskill Mountains, with his husband Julio. They just might ‘set sail’ once more, together this time—no one knows what the future holds. But at the present moment, this volume holds only a past that has become as vast as the future once was.

Additional information

Weight 16.3 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × 1 in