Richard Hamasaki

Softcover, 119 pp.

Like a collage of moving images, From the Spider Bone Diaries, Poems and Songs provides a visual as well as a literary and lyrical feast. Readers will immediately sense movement and varied landscapes in its many poetic genres. The words herein can be sung, chanted, intoned, splashed on sidewalks, painted on murals, scrawled on walls, performed by an ensemble of musicians and actors, or silently absorbed.

Spider Bone Diaries can be revisited often. Like a hitchhiker, the reader may want to stay on for all or part of the ride, for the destinations are many and the scenes varied. While never the "accidental tourist," the poet provides images from personal experiences viscerally drawn from experiences in Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the continental United States.

Moving from humor to sweetness, from suffering to sarcasm, from darkness to epiphany, a stanza, a moment, a line, even just a word lingers in the reader's mind like a fragrance stimulating a stream of memories.