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Rumors of Fallible Gods
by Peter Ludwin
108 pages/# poems (need to know number of poems)
Publisher: Presa Press
Date: July 2012
ISBN:ISBN:978-0-9831251-8-1
Price: $15.95
Need a link to where one can order


About the Book:

Rumors of Fallible Gods, a collection of poems set in Latin America, Europe, Asia and North Africa, is a testament to the author's
love of Mexico and Greece as well as a journey through the dark side of history in China, Tibet, Guatemala and a Nazi concentration
camp in the former Czechoslovakia. Besides offering an Old World/New World dynamic, Ludwin's poems oscillate between responses to
horrific history and personal transcendence achieved in cultures of extraordinary aesthetic beauty and spontaneous expression.


Advance Praise:

"With Rumors of Fallible Gods, Peter Ludwin establishes himself as a citizen of the poetic imagination, availing readers of the
intricate relationships between the geopolitical and the personal worlds we create and shape every day." –William O'Daly

"Here in the undermind is the poetry of Peter Ludwin – mythic, strange, amazing. This book is a key or a map or even an entrance
itself to the way...down." –Tony Barnstone

"Here we find an artist at the peak of his powers, where vision and craft conjoin "to inhabit the transparent pearl, the drop/in
perpetual motion that spells a history." When you pick up Peter Ludwin's book, put on your traveling shoes – you're going on a
journey." –Joseph Stroud


About the Author:

Peter Ludwin, of Kent, Washington, is the recipient of a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust. He has been nominated for a Pushcart
Prize, and was awarded Special Merit recognition by The Comstock Review for his entry in the 2011 the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial
Award Contest. His first book, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published in 2009 by Word Walker Press. Rumors of Fallible Gods, his
second book, was a two-time Finalist for the Gival Press Poetry Award, and was published by Presa Press in July, 2012.



From the Book:

Inside the Blue Mosque, Istanbul
by Peter Ludwin

Say the word aloud, say blue,
and the mind teems with guests:
Renoir, Vermeer, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy,
Picasso’s Blue Period, the lines
from a Mark Doty crab poem:
a shocking Giotto blue.

Say blue, and a marlin taildances on the water,
a slide guitar spells heartache in plural.
Woke up this mornin’, I believe I’ll dust my broom.
Frida lives on in la Casa Azul.
And the beggar trapped in a hash dream
haze hails bands of blue men from the Sahara.

Say blue, and doors swing wide open.
To speak it here adds yet another
tile to the thousands already present.
Did Gershwin divine such a rhapsody?
Such a dazzling faience mosaic?
Or is blue encoded in our cells,

a script for the primal color of being?
Look around. When you left your shoes
at the door, didn’t you slough off
your skin so blue could breathe,
could curl phantom-like among the pillars,

a counterpoint
to the slow, steady rhythm
of a cobbler tapping out his blood
beat in the bazaar, circa 1650?
Blue. It haunts the back alleys,

a companion for the road, for the long haul,
for daughter and courtesan a final recumbent address.
First water, last silence, the country in between.
Blue Danube. Blue bayou. Cordon bleu.
The heron and the kingfisher. Blue.


 


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