Sojourner, So To Speak

A collection of disarming poems by an Austrian American that "speaks" like map ponderings along the route of blue highways. His slightly estranged journey follows neighborhood streets to downtown hotels and interstates toward a zen that is not Zen, but found by singing in a lawnchair in a backyard in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Scenes and events of daily life are recorded from a still center amid the flux of our vida loca. With a language precise in construction, the agile wit of these poems conveys a conversation with the Muse of glimpse and sagacity. Reading Joe Somoza's poems opens us up like an encounter with classic Chinese poets such as T'ao Ch'ien or Li-po--within domestic observance are the quiet profundities which cause even the dust to glow.