Landscapes of the Exiled (Paperback or Softback)

Landscapes of the Exiled is a journey into the interior. In the beginning we are rooted in a specific, yet unnamed place, an island where birds die against picture window glass and we try to resurrect them. Stationery ocean rocks appear to move and, on closer inspection become giant seals that move inland in a threatening manner. The further we go into the interior, the darker and more surreal the journey becomes until we arrive at a place where the exiles themselves are.

These people, places, objects were written over a period of forty years and are heavily inflected by European unnaturalists Ritsos and Transtromer. Neighbors becomes Eumenides who spy on our houses, neighbors beat their dogs to death, and ceaselessly drag garbage to the curb, creating sparks where their metal containers strike the concrete. Girlfriends throw their partner's possessions from second floor windows; a wife makes her end of season turning of the garden into a physical assault of the earth. These neighbors may be rooted to a place but they are exiled from the contemporary world as we know it and become more so as the sequence unfolds. The final section is a literal voyage in the dark, a journey to the end of a night of the soul. Is it a dream or a real journey? The spirit guide is a kind of disembodied voice that has an improbable name, Gladys, and is the product of an actual dream where Gladys offers the poet a corkscrew saying, "You never know when you might need one." The ensuing journey, with corkscrew securely in hand, the poet travels a darkling plain that becomes a steep climb with caves in it, to where? Interior monologues are impressions, expressions of this trek without purpose, other than the trek itself; we keep moving because moving is what we do.

At times the thinking and the speaking are indistinguishable like a Beckett play on a dark stage with a drawn blackout curtain between the poet and the exterior voices, places where only the hint of shadow moving is visible. In the end there is a kind of dawning, a place in a valley below where there maybe be a guest house with a picture window that fatally impacts bird's flight patterns.

Alan Catlin has been publishing poetry, fiction, reviews and the odd collage in littles, independents, and university magazines since the 70's. He can say, with complete confidence, that he is the only poet in the world to have published in Random Weirdness, Tray Full of Lab Mice, Yammering Twits, The Seattle Review, Wisconsin Review, Descant, The Literary Review and Wordsworth's Socks. He has won several chapbook contests including the Slipstream one and been a finalist in several major university book contests. He lost count after thirty Pushcart nominations and has been nominated for Best of the Net, Rhysling and Bram Stoker awards. As a poet of many voices, he has published full-length collection reflecting his work as professional barman that included the recent triptych of Carpe Diem books: Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged (Roadside Press), Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell (Roadside Press) and Last Call for Lazarus (Impspired). His American Odyssey and Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Press examined the American Experience. The third in this series of art and life was published by Dos Madres as Asylum Garden: after Van Gogh. His life and times of Diane Arbus was a labor of love brought to fruition by Kelsay Books as How Will the Heart Endure? An eleven-chapbook series of "movie poems" was recently completed with three volumes of three chapbooks each, plus two others separate little books including the Slipstream Contest Winner, Blue Velvet. The working title of those was Hollyweird, and extended a year's long project of social commentary disguised as bar poems called Alien Nation. A covid project of numbered prose like snap shot poems was published by Dos Madres as Memories Too, and represents what happens when the narrative impulse dies in isolation. His fictional memoir, a retirement project that began and finished before Covid, Chaos Management, was published by Alien Buddha. He is currently culling his vast archives for the forgotten and the lost over decades of creation. A recent discovery assembled into book form is The Work Anxiety Poems which includes uncollected work experience poems, and actual anxiety dreams about that experience, all of which happened after he retired.