Dream Work

Featuring forty-four poems covering more than forty years of creative output, R. Bentz Kirby's Dream Work offers one author's creative quest to describe his vision of the truth and beauty found while traversing the landscape both of the human soul and the natural world surrounding us, and perhaps even the world beyond this one.

That's right: Kirby has been to the other side and back. After being clinically dead for several minutes following a 2012 Sudden Cardiac Arrest event, thanks to quick-acting loved ones, bystanders and EMT first responders, Bentz's heartbeat resumed and allowed him to return to his normal, happy life--a small miracle.

And once he fully recovered his health, he found the experience of dying not only filled his soul with gratitude at getting another chance, but had also opened a portal of post-event creativity, as well as shedding new light and insight on earlier poems and songs he'd written.

With this slice of personal history in mind, Dream Work presents an amalgamation of work depicting less a "before and after" phase of one human's life than a totality of experience, including the briefest of glimpses through the veil surrounding the eternally mysterious transition of human consciousness from life into death.

From the introduction by Worthy Evans: "These dreams and these journeys are indeed the poet's. But gratefully, Bentz has written down these journeys, and they are boxes that are opened up, for us to look over, and maybe consider what our own journeys and dreams may reveal to us."

Bentz Kirby lives in the Rosewood area of Columbia, South Carolina. Educated first as a social worker and later a lawyer, he has been writing poetry since around 1969, but Dream Work is his first poetry collection. As a songwriter, he has published two albums of music, Name Checkin' with Alien Carnival (2008) and Secret World with Jellyroll & Delicious Dish (2017). A survivor of a Sudden Cardiac Arrest, he is a big fan of Automated External Defibrillators. Other than enjoying life with his wife May, their children and a brood of pets, he writes and performs music with his friends.

James D. McCallister is the author of four novels-KING'S HIGHWAY (2007), FELLOW TRAVELER (2012), LET THE GLORY PASS AWAY (2017), and DOGS OF PARSONS HOLLOW (2018)-as well as a short story collection, THE YEAR THEY CANCELED CHRISTMAS. His published work also includes creative nonfiction, magazine features, a newspaper column, and scholarly articles. A past winner or finalist for awards from the South Carolina Writer's Association, SC Fiction Project, Pearl Magazine, the Faulkner Society, the Saturday Evening Post, and The Jasper Project, in 2014 McCallister's papers relating to FELLOW TRAVELER were accessioned by McHenry Library at the University of California-Santa Cruz as part of the official Grateful Dead Archive. McCallister adjuncts in creative writing at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, SC, where he lives with his wife Jenn and beloved brood of cats, muses all. For more information: www.jamesdmccallister.com jamesdmccallister@gmail.com