John Bennett | Six Poets | Hcolom Press
John Thomas – Ann Menebroker – Ronald Koertge – Lyn Lifshin – Al Masarik – Gerda Penfold Continue reading
JOHN BENNETT writes with a tiny, fist-sized stuffed bear in sorcerer’s garb on top of his computer. Not too many years back he wrote on a wide-carriage manual typewriter. On the road he writes on legal pads and napkins. The bear is a gift from his granddaughter, a perceptive, jewel of a girl with laughing eyes. Veteran small-press poet and writer, editor and publisher of the legendary Vagabond Press. A brace of fine books to his credit, including the novel Bodo that came out in New York, London and Prague editions and got nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award.
John Bennett began writing Shards in the mid-nineties and has never looked back.
John Thomas – Ann Menebroker – Ronald Koertge – Lyn Lifshin – Al Masarik – Gerda Penfold Continue reading
Absolutes are not accessible thru the senses. All sensory experience is a vicarious thrill. Ratchet your learning beyond the threshold of fear, and when the bolts begin to pop and an entire ocean rushes thru a pinhole, then it will happen. Something quite unimaginable that you knew all along. —John Bennett Continue reading
A novel about a German war orphan who grows up in America and self-destructs in a burst of flashbacks in the Sixties. — John Bennett Continue reading
To Jesse Helms, without whose inspiration this collection might never have coalesced. —John Bennett Continue reading
Betrayal’s Like That is killer. I’m so impressed with this book that if you order it and you don’t agree with me, I’ll send you whatever you feel you overpaid. —Joe Grant Continue reading
The Shards in “The Birth of Road Rage” were written over a span of time ranging from the mid 1990s until late in 2004. Some of them that sound as if they were written post 9/11 were actually written years earlier. Which goes to show that if you’ve got your finger on the pulse, you can hear the beating heart of the future. Which goes to show that Time is an illusion. — John Bennett Continue reading
A FEW WORDS FROM THE EDITOR Maia Penfold, known at the time as Gerda Penfold, drifted into my life in 1974 via an envelope packed with poems. I read those poems in one setting, published them and others in a chapbook titled Done with Mirrors, and from that point on, over the next turbulent thirty-six years, Maia has been a spiritual and creative running mate who remains fiercely independent and disinclined to compromise. She is a force of nature, no less so at the age of 82 than when she was a young girl in Saskatchewan and a young woman in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and her poetry is charged with this force, an elixir of wonder and innocence, biting wit and easy sophistication, an intelligence that drills to the core. She may be the most overlooked poet of the second half of the 20th century, and it came to me (as these things tend to do) in a flash of inspiration that I needed to collect as many of her poems as I could locate and put them into book form—Maia’s life has been hard and nomadic, and many of her poems have been lost along the way. Not long after that I found myself on a ferry to Bainbridge Island off the coast of Washington where Maia then lived. Continue reading
Passing on the Fire In 1987 I published a piece of journalism in The Clinton Street Quarterly that won the Darrell Bob Houston Award. That kicked off a sporadic burst … Continue reading
The stories in U-Haul with Dinosaur were written over a period of time stretching from the late Seventies into the new millennium. They don’t necessarily appear in the order in which they were written, and consequently the reader is at times exposed to violent shifts in style and perception from one story to the next — a little like being in a Formula-One race car with Ayrton Senna as it snakes through the Brazilian Grand Prix down shifting on the curves and roaring away at 150 mph on the straightaways. These are the last of my uncollected stories, and if there is a common thread that runs through them, it involves drinking and not drinking and love gone haywire. Continue reading
In John Bennett’s novel, Children of the Sun & Earth an intelligent, steady-nerved young man and veteran named Tobias climbs the rungs of power in the cutthroat world of drug dealing and heavily armed Mexican cartels. By applying the right amount of respect and confidence in meetings with the heads of the Morales cartel, the Huichol Indian tribe, all the way to Pablo Escobar, Tobias sets himself up for the ultimate showdown between the DEA, a Vietnam Colonel named Wild Harry Witherspoon, the top drug lord in the world, and a team of highly-skilled Vietnam veterans. — strong>Adam Michael Luebke – Dear Dirty America Continue reading