GPT

This collection moves through spiritual crisis, violence, memory, performance, countercultural appetite, and survival with a voice that keeps testing whether private damage can be spoken without being flattened into neat explanation. Across the book, the poems return to thresholds: between faith and despair, myth and daily life, spectacle and conscience, the body and whatever it still hopes to become.

Many of these poems read like acts of witness rather than polished arguments. They keep the jaggedness of speech, sudden leaps in image, and typewritten pressure of the originals, and the closing beach horizon gives the collection a late movement toward stillness rather than conquest.

Claude

A late collection (roughly 2010) of typewritten poems in which a long life takes inventory of itself: counterculture memory, faith, craft, violence, and elegy held in one unsteady voice. The poems keep returning to thresholds - a remembered 1968 Los Angeles of red wine and revolution, an apocalyptic strain in 'The Secondhand', the confessed and reckless ascent of 'The Fall I Never Feared', and quieter passages of counsel and craft, where a 'Daughter of God' is told to 'Name the flowers and plants' and 'Make your work a signature'. The 'riddle' of the title is less a puzzle to solve than a condition to inhabit.

What holds the book together is a quality of attention rather than a single argument - a voice that moves between prayer and profanity, philosophical abstraction and street-level detail, and refuses to smooth its own contradictions. Several poems are openly retrospective, catching themselves in the act of remembering, so the collection reads as a writer near the end of a body of work auditing his own faith, craft, and survival. Source spellings are kept as written, and the typewritten roughness reads as decisions made under pressure rather than polish.