“I started this book by following the tracks of a mythical creature composed of language and blood across an unblemished field of silence. I never catch this creature who perhaps is made real by my pursuit of it. There are glimpses–shadows–made into poems in a poor attempt to construct the whole from the parts. This book is a brush dipped in flowers–corpses–schoolyards–the smell of ocean and tears attempting to paint over without erasing the world as it is.”

-Gary Lemos 

Mechanistic models of reality which are normatively driven have never really felt plausible to me. In the quest for formal causality and ontological coherence, they miss out on the subtle life brimming within conversational affect, imagistic metaphor, and expansive silence. This is why I feel the pulse of Gary Lemons's poetry so deeply - his poems are sourced from that temple in the mist, which is a warmly welcoming threshold for a seeker. 

I am committed to combat the emotional inertia that has gripped so many of us, as we hide insulated from our own vulnerability, safe in our cocoons of denial. Do read my friend Gary's words, and let the liberating tide of tears wash over the field of your yearnings, let it be the ink that writes a new path into existence, and then let your smile be a testament to the songs emerging from your breathscape. Gary’s utterances are fractal expressions of the star within dust, the voice hidden in the pause, the om within shanti. 

- Shabnam Mirchandani

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