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 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.
