Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 90
- Language: English
- Date Published: March 2021
- ISBN 978-1-953252-20-3
Alan Catlin’s Memories is a dream book that leaps from right now to way back. In short, bursting vignettes he lets his mind and words play across memory and all the randomness memory triggers. From an opium dream to Candace Bergen, from a side glance at racial tensions to a parting glance at Mrs. Robinson, Catlin floats his readers down a stream of memory bubbles, then reaches up and pulls them into a fractured world beneath the surface. This book exhilarates with startling images and jazzy, jagged cadences. —Mike James
“These center format prose poems are a meditation on a lifetime of American Popular Culture and how that culture influences the thoughts of an individual.” —Su Zi
Memories is candidly witty and lyrical. Alan Catlin offers the reader glimpses of his ephemeral dreams in this, his latest eclectic collection of well-shaped poetry. His images are fresh and from the urban beaches of whatever it is that makes him tick. The poet is sure to gain new fans with this stunner. —Roberta Beach Jacobson
Excerpt
-207-
“What happens to people who live inside
their phones.” Dom DeLillo wrote. In
The Silence. Soap opera plot line or
reformatting of Poltergeist. The Conversation.
A wedding in hell with no cell service.
The 18th green outside of the reception in
Melancholia. The movie. Wagner and Despair.
The book and the movie. The world does end.
Literally. Metaphor or the future revealed.
Do we care. Who’s your provider.
Author
Alan Catlin has been fighting in the trenches of the poetry wars since the 70’s. During that time he has accumulated a diverse resume of credits that range from the totally obscure (and vaguely ridiculous) to well-regarded, long-standing college and university magazines. He can proudly say, without a doubt, that he is the only poet ever to publish in Wordsworth’s Socks, The Margarine Maypole Orangutan Express, the Literary Review, Descant, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol and the legendary Wormwood Review. He has also shown an uncanny ability to have chapbooks, and full-length books, win contests or been published, that became the last project of the press thereby dooming them to total obscurity. The four times that happened began to feel like a jinx though he clings to the hope that these belly-up-in-small-press-land books and the defuncting of presses, were merely a coincidence. The three editors who died before they could do his book don’t count. In 2020 four handsome Catlin books arrived, from four different presses, on completely different subjects. Then the plague happened. 2021 promises to be a better year. These four, new full-length books are, Asylum Garden: after Van Gogh (Dos Madres), Lessons in Darkness (Luchador Press a division of Spartan Books), The Blue Hotel, (Cyberwit) and Memories (Alien Buddha Press).
