Shopping Cart Dreams: Available Now

I am pleased to annouce that my fourth poetry book Shopping Cart Dreams has just been published by Kelsay Books. A full-length collection offering an eclectic range of poems ranging from serious to quirky and absurd, this is my most ambitious work yet. Though mostly free verse, it includes a number of prose, ekphrastic, and found poems as well as several sonnets and a sestina. Two-thirds of the poems included here have previously appeared or been accepted for publication in literary journals. Read what one advance reviewer writes:

“In these poems on People, Places, Journeys, Choices, and Perplexities, our senses awaken to new ways of perceiving what has been before us for years. Gene Twaronite works sometimes in set forms (sestina, sonnets), but also in prose poems and found poems and mostly in free verse. For him, the poet’s task is to watch and listen, taste and touch, until words reveal their identities. At times, those identities are ekphrastic: Edward Hopper and Thomas Moran are decisive. At times, we meet the tenderness of a father’s love (“Yellow Fireworks”) or a stranger’s empathy (“Doppelganger”). At their best, Twaronite’s poems bring us face to face with the wounded and marginalized people we might pass by every day, making us alive to what lies beneath the surface. Listen closely, reader, to those poems that turn on the moments when there is “nothing to fear / but the failure / to see the pain / of all things” (“Surprises”).”

—Richard Newhauser, Professor   
Department of English, Arizona State University

Available here: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/shopping-cart-dreams