Abe Runyan, a fictional songwriter and performer, narrates a journey from the upper Midwest to Greenwich Village, exploring the influences that shaped a legendary musical figure. Through his personal recollections and original quatrains, the story delves into the creative process and the essence of artistic identity. This novel serves as a homage and investigation into the imagination behind music, offering a rich tapestry of experiences that illuminate the making of a musical soul.
During the course of his career, poet-writer Baron Wormser has investigated the hearts of many matters. In Some Months in 1968, he portrays the Brownsons, a family of five living in suburban Baltimore, who experience one of the most tumultuous moments in American history. Using elements of flash-fiction, biography, poetry, history and essay, he reaches into the immediacy of daily breakfasts and the minds of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Ho Chi Minh, into the consumer culture of the United States and the stirrings of political and spiritual conscience, into music and raw violence. As a novel, Some Months in 1968, offers a vision of a society riven by conflicts. The relevance of those months, as this remarkable novel makes plain, remains.
A new edition of an evergreen back-to-nature book in the tradition of Thoreau. For nearly twenty-five years, poet Baron Wormser and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water. They grew much of their own food, carried water by hand, and read by the light of kerosene lamps. They considered themselves part of the “back to the land” movement, but their choice to live off the grid was neither a statement nor a protest: they simply had built their house too far from the road and could not afford to bring in power lines. Over the years, they settled into a life that centered on what Thoreau would have called “the essential facts.” In this graceful meditation, Wormser similarly spurns ideology in favor of observation, exploration, and reflection. “When we look for one thread of motive,” he writes, “we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.” His refusal to be satisfied with the obvious explanation, the single thread of motive, makes him a keen and sympathetic observer of his neighbors and community, a perceptive reader of poetry and literature, and an honest and unselfconscious analyst of his own responses to the natural world. The result is a series of candid personal essays on community and isolation, nature, civilization, and poetry. Lovely and rich, The Road Washes Out in Spring is an immersive read. A new preface by the author rounds out this new edition.
Formally innovative poems that engage with history and the individual.In his eleventh poetry collection, Baron Wormser offers the wide range of subjects and imaginative approaches that his readers have come to expect. Touching on topics such as the Jewish resistance, Godard films, and the National Football League, The History Hotel opens the door to both political and personal histories. This collection also introduces us to unforgettable characters—we follow alongside speakers as they drive through Kansas, as they memorize Shakespeare sonnets, and as they rehearse a love affair that went south.As Wormser’s collection reminds us, the historical circumstances that touch, strengthen, or shatter a life are also key to understanding it. We all live in the History Hotel , where love, betrayal, hope, and despair go hand in hand. Showing those entangled hands is the work of these poems—poems that are alive to tradition but consistently inventive along the way.
