Poetry. "Are you reading this to see, friend, if you want to ramble through what's inside? Fair enough. It's not a page turner I'm after, nor airport fiction. I'm after undoing words, so that contexts both make them transparent and invite colors and projections of heart. And more, smear the palette of mere being. Mayday, and all the alarms in the world going off at once are morning birds in Delta bluffs woods, taking me out to the bothy to watch waves on the lake, and a pontoon gliding into an easterly, on westering waters. The boat moves to the east all morning tied to the dock. Until I ask what science traffics in deliberate misunderstandings, incorporates illusions that the senses verify, purposes to undo 'the real world,' as parents say. What is proved more than the worlds it takes to stay in place, and the worlds moved to life by the eye stayed in watching."—Gordon Osing

Author City: HERNANDO, MS USA

Gordon Osing is now retired after teaching at the University of Memphis since 1973. There he founded The River City Writers Series, now in its thirty-fifth year. He is the author of MEANWHILE (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011), SLAUGHTERING THE BUDDHA (Spuyten Duyvil, 2010), THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED: FICTIONS OF FAMILY EROS (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006), APO/CALYPSO (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002), From the Boundary Waters (Memphis State University Press, 1981), and Town Down River (St. Lukes Press, 1985). He has also translated widely from the Chinese. His travels to China inform his other verse and journal collection, The Water Radical. "The Center is everywhere attention gathers," he has said of his work in verse, prose, and translation. He now lives lakeside in Delta bluffs woods in Eudora, Mississippi, where he is continuing his career in reading, writing and traveling.