Böcker av Matthew Oliphant

He drifts through life disconnected. Even when a customer at the cafe he works at calls his attention to it, he doesn't quite see it. When a volcano destroys his car and a friend offers a very cheap plane ticket, he decides to find out what life is like outside the rut. That is, assuming he's in one...which he absolutely is, but he has to leave in order to gain perspective.Hemingway wrote, "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another," in The Sun Also Rises. The only rational response to this is, "No duh, but you'll never understand until you see it for yourself, Ernie."In his fourth book, In Search Of..., Matthew Oliphant chronicles a journey that takes place over the course of a few months between 1991 and 2051. While it is a memoir, and all parts of it are true, the story folds in aspects of the world that was, the world that is, and a world as it might yet be. Everything in it happened, but none of it is real. In fact, this book may not even exist.

I got a bee in my bonnet over the last weekend of October. One could argue, adroitly, that I was avoiding doing other things, but I think putting together 90% of this book over 2 days counts as being productive.I went through old hard drives, notebooks, and the web to find all the poetry I've written. It's not a lot, about 60 or so, but it was fun looking for them and revisiting some I'd not thought about for a few decades.This book is sort of a "collected works" edition. Some of the poems I've worked hard on and some of them were written in less than a minute. I think I tend to like those the best. There are one or two that I set out to do something very specific and I think I accomplished that.Could they all be better? Of course. Getting through the final 10% took another month.Are any of them great? One is.I could work for another 30 years on some of these-that's how poetry goes. But at some point, to steal a phrase from dayjob-land, you gotta ship it.This book is a word temple.At least, it wants to be.I hope you like the book you are about to read, even if it isn't this one.