Toward a Credo (Paperback or Softback)

“How far did you go in your sleep,” begins George Eklund’s Toward a Credo, “Gathering the elements of being / From blue flowers / Above the imagined sea.” What you hold in your hands is an assemblage of those elements of being, of magnetic tears and ashes in boxes, of green rain and dreaming acrobats, of church organs and the sounds of brass. The elements of being are small moments, unexpected mysteries, utter heartbreaks in gentle winds, and Eklund uses these to uncover worlds of wonder, where the mind is startled into creating new proteins and songs are sung by a voice wholly unique and instantly universal. This is the poetry that you feed to “the deity within.” This is the poetry that reverberates across the stars. This is the poetry of pure-grain possibility.

—Sean L Corbin, author of The Leper Dreams of Snow

Remember who you are now before you read this book. On the other side, you will be someone new. Someone aware of the shifting of tectonic plates. Yes, the newlyweds are slow dancing, a driver at the light's still sitting there even though it turned green four seconds ago—but you will know how quickly it all really moves. Your mind will be awake to its own processes, and language will never again be anything less than a tornado at your heels.

—Chris Prewitt, author of Paradise Hammer

Toward a Credo will blow a hole clear through you, and when you recover you will wonder how you could ever hold so much. George Eklund invites us to trace the contours of the mind where it meets the world, fault lines whose shiftings reveal the places where concept and feeling push against each other and spark the deepest underground fires. He asks us to consider a credo, a kind of seeing that begins with our vulnerabilities, moves through the damage from our losses and our ephemerality, and envisions the far ranges of the human heart. Eklund tears apart our linguistic expectations to reveal that within the shell of our ordinary grammar lies the hidden life of feeling which has an anatomy, a geology, a physics all its own. Here you will feel it—duende, the power of the feral imagination wed to the fury of emotion, yet rendered with rare tenderness and beauty.

—Dan Butterworth, author of Waiting for Rain, The Clouds of Lucca,, and forthcoming Drunken Man on a Bicycle