Crunk dances with his readers creating rhthyms that speak to the most sophisticated mind as well as the toughest heart. His themes of redemption, comprised salvation, and life crushed by experience are like delicious wine. Provocative reading.

It took me back to the days growing up in the south. What he saw, you saw. What he heard, you heard. It appears simplistic, but underneath, there are many layers. He is truly brilliant!

His poetry is better than his prose, but that is high praise indeed for this collection of poems and essays that are so meaningful they cause a tingling sensation every time I read them. I wait eagerly for another collection of Crunk's work to appear.

These are rare, beautiful poems. Her images breathtaking. I love this book.

Octavio Paz said once that to read a poem is to let "words enter through our ears, appear before our eyes, disappear in contemplation." This is what Marissa de los Santos offered us. And in its various incarnations. In her poems, the writer also allows the words to enter our eyes, appear in contemplation and to never disappear from within.

Lightness and grace permeate the words in this book. Throughout, the reader can sense a warm heart and compassionate eye. A joy to read for observations on family, on history, on nostalgia, on desire...the poems create a beautiful presence and experience for the attentive reader. I thank the poet for her words.

I love these poems, and find myself returning to them again and again over the years. Talvikki Ansel combines the acute precision of a scientific eye with shimmering, translucent, finely-honed language. Her mastery of the sonnet form in the second and third sections of the volume seems virtually effortless -- as if the poems have simply transcended the rigors of form. These are poems of fierce and delicate inquiry (a study of bats, the dissection of a bird, the exploration of a pear down to its very core, the unraveling of the memory of a season spent in the Amazon Rainforest); poems of travel, explorers, and exploration; and poems of being forever changed by the processes of inquiry and exploration, like Caliban, or Elizabeth Bishop's Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, perhaps Ansel is, or will be, our Elizabeth Bishop of the new century. Ansel's poetic voice is clear, warmly modulated, and threaded throughout with marvelous flickers of quiet whimsy and humor. These are poems that resonate and linger. I highly recommend this book.

Telvicki Ansel communicates the multiple awareness of self, nature, and the unmanefest. She can have you hold a pear as she has held it, and feel the humorous frustration of raising miniature horses.

"My Shining Archipelago" is a real find.

If you want to eat healthy, on good tasing foods, and do it cheap this is the book you MUST HAVE. The side benefit is that you will create a more sulf reliant life style that is great for the entire family. This is the book everyone will be getting for gifts this year.

Having an earlier 1974 version, I find this new update absolutely fascinating. Rita Bingham continues her mother Esther Dickey's legacy by providing us with the most current information to help us learn provident living. Not only does Ms. Bingham tell us what to do, but how, and where to go for additional information. She tells us how to use that information, and her recipes are wonderful. This is one of only two books that I recommend to my friends who want to be more self-sufficient, the other being "Making The Best Of Basics" by James Talmadge Stevens. This duo is a must have base for anyone wanting to learn more about taking care of themselves.

First of all this is a great book. Iam buying it for my grandso
in his new house for a coffee table book. The price was good and the condition of the book was excellent. You can't beat the packing and shipping time.

WAYFARER by James Dickey and William A. Bake. A haunting story from the mountains of the South and 178 glorious full-color photos by "The Faulkner of Photography."

I became familiar with James Dickey while pursuing my BFA in writing, and I keep finding myself coming back to his poetry. All of the "famous" ones are here, as well as a few lesser-known gems--such as "Pursuit From Under"--that cannot be lived without,especially if you love great poetry. Dickey was persecuted after "The Fire Bombing" because it showed the bombing of Japan in WWII as beautiful, but it is easy, when reading the poem, to forgive this and understand that Dickey was one of the great masters of poetry. I rank him among the best and most gifted. It's amazing that a man who was once an executive for big buisiness turned out some of the most important poetry ever written. Sensitive and enlightening, this is a collection I would recomment to anyone. Peace not war.

i have been a fan of james dickey's work since college. now that i am teaching a college class in world poetry, i just couldn't resist choosing dickey. the problem was, which book to teach. i decided to use the whole motion because it spans dickey's career, including every important poem of this great, underated american poet. poetry lovers will recognize some of his more anthologized works (the lifeguard, the firebombing, cherrylog road) and will be thrilled to find other penetrating works of art regarding nature, war, guilt, love, family, and so on. i personally recommend the poem drinking from a helmet, one of the greatest american poems i've ever read. if you love dickey's novel deliverance (one of the greatest american novels ever written) as much as i do, then you will certainly love this body of poety, a must for people who are interested in poetry about the power of nature, as well as the intracacies of human nature.

Intelligently written and theoretically sophisticated, Clabough's book links Dickey's novels together in a new and unusual way, while also discussing large amounts of Dickey's unpublished fiction. Perhaps most notable, is his/her outstanding chapter on the currently out-of-print "Alnilam," which illustrates the complexities of that massive work: Dickey's attempted masterpiece. This book makes me want to reread all of Dickey's novels, which is perhaps the most telling sign of its value and success.

I love poets from the American South. There is a sensuality and feeling-first ethic that make them distinctive.

The book opens with the sad and lovely "Diabetes," which describes its initial and eventual symptoms: "I thirsted like a prince...my belly going round and round with self-/ Made night-water..gangrene and kidney/ Failure...boils blindness skin trouble falling/ Teeth coma and death."

Knowing a diabetic personally makes this melancholic meditation highly poignant for me: "One pocket nailed with needles and injections, the other dragging/ With sugar cubes to balance me in life...Tell me, black riders, does this do any good?"

The poem's diabetic is courting death, "a livable death at last": "Heavy summer is right/ For a long drink of beer (a diabetic no- no)...my body is turning, is flashing unbalanced/ Sweetness everywhere, and I am calling my birds."

"Messages" contrasts the childhood and adolescence of the poet's son. In childhood, father and son chase "Butterflies"; all is playful frivolity. In the gorgeous "Giving a Son to the Sea," Section II of this poem, Dickey realizes he will lose his son to other loves and other lands: "And I must let you go, out of your gentle/ Childhood into your own man suspended..." It oozes fatherly affection as the poet addresses his "gentle blonde/ Son."

"Apollo" honors American astronauts but sees Dickey going a bit over the top verbally, something he is perpetual danger of doing. On the other hand, his abstract mysterious work in "The Place" is stunning: On a frigid winter night, a pair of lovers look for a place private enough to share a secret.

"The Cancer Match" brings bracing optimism to a troubling diagnosis, and "Venom" brings the same message to a snakebite sufferer. This pair of poems are like a Southern faith-healing; they ask sheer belief and willfulness to conquer death: "Turn the poison/ Round turn it back on itself O turn it/ Good: better than life they whisper:/ Turn it, they hammer whitely:/ Turn it, turn it,/ Brother."

"Blood" is about the murder of a woman, and the reader can't be sure if the poet is the killer or someone who stumbled upon the scene. I recommend it for its beautiful violence and its mystery. "In the Pocket" is a witty ode to a football quarterback; it's great to see Dickey take on unlikely poetic topics. It contains the great lines "My friends are crumbling/ Around me the wrong color is looming," as the QB scrambles for safety.

"Madness" is a masterpiece about a beloved family dog dying because it coupled with a rabid she-wolf. A chilling study of a canine femme fatale which has a subtext about human adultery, the poem suggests a conflict between the longing for freedom and domesticity. This is a sensual tour-de-force, perhaps the volume's best poem. The rabid she-wolf is "slopping soap." "She burned alive/ In her smell." She taunts the dog, claiming, "I'm what you come/ Out here in the bushes for." The beloved pet, the "spirit of the household" is welcomed back soon after his coupling, his fatal bite confused for damage from barbed wire. When he develops the wolf's disease, however, and bites the family's youngest child, he must be put to death.

"The Eye-Beaters" is a long complex and challenging poem about dealing with trauma. The poet visits a home for children, many of whom have gone blind and are strikng their eyes with their fists. This is too much to take, and the poet invents a fiction to deal with this horror. It's an argument for romanticizing, something the poet does in this whole emotion-charged, sensual collection. "The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy" captures the tumult of late-60s America. Dickey writes abstract associative free verse, but make every word count in a way even the Beat poets rarely do. This is a poetic masterwork, very masculine, very Southern, from the author of "Deliverance." Get it and soak in its honesty and vitality.

A very good book of poems. Lovely stuff about Turkey.

Coming from a person that reads a lot of novels, I feel that I am in a position to rate EJD's lastest novel five stars plus. The thought, and effort entered into the writing of this book, comes through loud and clear. Others should keep in mind, it's only a novel to be enjoyed, and not taken seriously,or equated with anyone's personal situation. The love for another's talent should be met with gratitude. It's stated in other reviews that the author belittles black women. It's just a story born in the author's head, and not necessarily his personal views. How about for entertainment purposes only? That's is why we have choices in what we choose to read. I appreciate good literature, and an author with an imagination. One that can make the reader laugh, cry and feel all of the emotions that are written within the pages. An author that allows his characters to have an imaginable life, would prove to be, in my opinion, talented.

Cheaters is one of the best novels that I have read recently. It focuses on today's dating game and the twists and turns as it relates to relationships - be it one on one or more than one. The content of this novel deals with the aspects that many other writers opt not to deal with. It explores love, truth, honesty, sex, sexuality, pain, suffering and emotional turmoil. It really opens up an avenue that shows the side of African American males that they want to keep hidden. It addresses the sensitive side that men try to hide and opens a woman's eye to that side of men. It's a great book and I have recommended it to all of my friends and fellow readers. If you're just beginning to read or if you're a member of a book club I highly recommend Cheaters for your enjoyment. I've have enjoyed all of his novels to this date and I can't wait for his new novel.

Cheaters, a novel by Eric Jerome Dickey, is not only wonderfully written, witty, and entertaining, but is also realistic and enlightening as well. Each character has his or her own unique voice. Cheater's, Dickey's sexy and sassy novel, takes readers into the Los Angeles singles scene. Dickey explores all the hassels of everyday life and paints a realistc view of life in general. Dickey takes us on an adventure in betrayal, seduction, heartbreak, and true love. Readers will fall in love with Chante, who is so unlucky when it comes to love; that is until she meets the right man- Stephan. Her emotions are so honest, and she is the epitome of the single woman looking for Mr. Right, only to discover that Mr. right wasn't so right after all. This insightful novel also shows relationships from both the male and female perspective. Chante and her best friends Karen and Tammy are soul sisters, and have stayed close throughout each trial and tribulation each has ungergone. They have been together when each has found love, lost love, gone looking for love, and gave up on love. From the male perspective there's Stephan and his best friends Jake and Darnell, who are living well with good jobs and promising futures. Stephan and Jake attract numerous beautiful women and believe the more the merrier. Darnell is married and stayed faithful, despite rough times until he meets a woman who truly understands him. The characters discover just how far they can push each other, and how in the end, cheaters will get caught, and so the game will end. You will love Cheaters, and will not want to put it down.