The Loss Published

Cover by Walter Ruhlmann

This book can be ordered from lulu.com

February 25, 2013. I lost the man who gave me life. The one who brought me up in my first months. The one who partly made me into who I am today.

This loss has conveyed so many other thoughts and losses.

My memory of things past, my self-confidence, a relapse in the fondness for the one I share my life with, my mind.

The Loss followed by GMO (Great Moments of Oblivion) was written during a period of doubts and uncertainties. Life's events always inspire me. They are my fuel, my muses, my most terrible companions when I sit in front of the digital page to write.

Yet they are inescapable partners which encircle and billow around me all day long and balloon as I start mooning over whatever my poetry is made of.

It has been a pleasure to work with Sandy Benitez from Flutter Press. Her celerity and hard work to release this work and to make it possible to be shared with the world were appreciated.

One year after two of my previous collections were published Maore (Lapwing Publishing) and Carmine Carnival (Lazarus Media), to have this chapbook published fills me with pride and joy. I know this is the best homage I could give to my father. Not only because most of the poems in this collection are about him, our relationship and the frightening gap his death has brought, but because Great Moments of Oblivion is about food, and that he was a chef and taught me how to enjoy food.

I have to thank all editors and friends -- close or remote -- who have constantly supported me and my work.
David Herrle, Marie Lecrivain, RD Armstrong, Karla Linn Merrifield, Klaus J. Gerken, all at Mad Swirl Poetry Forum, Michelle Porter, A.J. Huffman and Apryl Salazano, Caleb Puckett, Tom and Eve O'Reilly, and so many others.

Thank you so much. I hope this book finds its place in this crazy indie-lit-press world.