Highly Suggested Reading from one of America's best "alive" poets..

From Dick Bakken's new online chapbook from Island Hills Books:

WHERE IS AMERICA GOING!

The Columbine Body Count

http://islandhills.tripod.com/bakken.htm

"I believe it's over. America is dead and finished. Our schoolboy pony express shooters are just now getting their gallop up. Going postal is on its way to messages we can't even nightmare. Our full volcanic compression of 400—of 2000!—years of lies and hypocrisy—so darkly denied, buried, suppressed to ferociously hellish explosiveness—is blowing like St. Helens back into our present."

Lilac's impression:

I've known Dick ever since I was knee high to a gracehoper. I met Dick one balmy August day up in the old Victorian just a hop, skip and jump away from St. Patrick's Catholic Cathedral. My voice I suppose, is what did it as I was suffering from too much inhaled therapies for the blues prior to the blues becoming an all out epidemic in America's High School High halls. We were all a bit different then. All the same...we came out just as we are right now.

As a small town theologian I can honestly say, Dick is recommending a ride on the ghost ship which avoids the flood.

In terms of the poetic merit of the chapbook, I can relay the news that it is as fine-tuned as anything anyone has ever endeavored to write. I have little doubt that Dick spent as many hours and days hacking it down to size and shape as he said he did. Dick rides a fantastic multi-trick pony into the skies on this one and finalizes it with a hearty Mufasa at the end where all great works of literature must aim their arrows in order to shoot their prize.