You knew this was coming (either that, or you haven’t been paying attention): From the Edge, a collection of poetry and vignettes, is now live on Amazon! W00t!
In putting this together, I encountered needs that never arose with my novels. Primary among them was the concept of a coherent theme, and right behind that, organization. These aspects were new to me, as with novels they’re just part of the package. Here, though, I was making a whole out of things that were never written as parts of a whole, so theme and organization suddenly took on new importance.
Sure, I could have just collected “poems I like” or “things I wrote in chronological order,” but I wanted the whole to have something to say, as a whole. This goal proved quite a challenge, though, since none of these pieces was written with the others in mind.
The first task, naturally, was to winnow the hundreds of pieces I’d written since the late ’90s into a manageable pile. Immediately I divided them into “Maybe” and “No” piles, a process I repeated, each time with a more exacting eye. Eventually, I had an “Almost Yes” pile of eighty or so pieces, all poetry and short poetic prose that would fit on one or two pages.
Next was to distill from these a theme. This was difficult, and literally kept me up at night. Eventually, though, it became clear that many dealt with a transition, and from that the concept of liminality became prominent. The title, I felt, should evoke that concept, and after trying out many of those, I settled on From the Edge, as in: from the edge of the century, the edge of the continent, the edge of patience, the edge of life, from the edge of a transition from one state to the next.
Then I needed to make a final cut and organize the pieces and here I fell back into true to geek-boy form. I put the pieces in a spreadsheet, analyzed their content, and determined a meaningful structure.
Yes, seriously.
It’s not as crazy as it sounds (or so I tell myself). Many of the pieces had a “seasonal” component, reflecting a certain time of year. Each one also carried an “emotional weight,” and I didn’t want the reader to be hit by (what I felt were) several hard-hitters in a row. Topic was a factor; just as I didn’t want three heavy poems in a row, neither did I want having three “nature” poems bunched together. Finally, the length had to be considered, both (again) to avoid clumps of longer works, but also (and more importantly) to ensure that the works requiring two pages could be read without breaking the flow by turning the page.
The result is a selection of nearly fifty pieces, from winter to winter, exploring the nature of transition and transformation.
Or, at least, that is the intent.
The last decision I made was to break with one of my guiding principles and only offer this in hardcopy. Presentation has a greater impact on poetry than on prose, and I spent many (many) iterations getting the font, format, and layout just right. If I were to adapt the book to a digital format, most of that would be lost, so, sorry-not-sorry, you won’t be able to read these in Arial or Times New Roman on your phone. Want to read them? You’ll have to go old-school.
So, From the Edge is alive and has been released into the wild. Go catch one (if you can)!
k
It’s been a week of retrospection, and I mean that in the most literal sense.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 