Eros & (Fill in the Blank)

Charles Freeland dances under moonlight. The landscape for his delightfully curious insights is visual, symbolic, a work of art and an advanced warning dusted with allusion, playfulness and literary confidence. A poem in prose, an epistolary project, Eros unspools advice wise, subversive and funny; very funny. Sentences tumble, one after the other. Truth rides shotgun to contradiction. I suspect James Joyee has placed an advanced order for this book-length paragraph of lilting depth and joy, as well as Charles Bernstein, Charles Simic, Lee Ann Brown, Frank O'Hara and assorted scholastics and philosophers. Freeland is Polonius on acid. Unlike Polonius, the author is advantaged by having read the tragedy's fifth act while simultaneously knowing pleasures of sensation and the "fact of the human body. Its shape like the modest ginger root." As only passionate careful writers can do, Freeland offers his readers - you and you and you - his brimming heart on his well-tailored sleeve. On our "advanced planet" Psyche is in danger, Eros cautions - though worth much regard. How bright Freeland's moon. ---Sarah Sarai, author of The Future Is Happy

Freeland's virtuosic proem embarks on an existential madrigal studded with fulgurate reflections, a literary eclair where moments of sharp simplicity will not brace us for constant intimate impact. There are no respites in this single exhalation, both irremediable and brassy in its delivery. Conspicuous blanks are as purloined as the thought-objects that populate this wordscape. ---Kane X. Faucher, author of Jonkil Dies (A Mesophysical Eulogy) and The Vicious Circulation of Dr. Catastrophe

Charles Freeland's poetic voice is that rarity of philosophical posits intertwined with a language of emotional accord. Eros & (Fill in the Blank) contains poetry of invention, reinvention, musical decency drawing the reader into Freeland's specialized poetic language. It involves the reader in the aspectual protocol of following the poet's patterned thought, of allowing for spatial interpretation to engage and familiarize one with the presence of greatness in a work of art. ---Felino A. Soriano, author of 15 collections of poetry, including Various Angles of the Interpretation Paradigm

Charles Freeland, a 2008 recipient of the Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, lives and works in Dayton, Ohio. His books and chapbooks include Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro, Grubb, Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just Patagonian Toothfish, Furiant, Not Polka, Eulalie & Squid, The Case of the Danish King Halfdene, and Where We Saw Them Last. His website is The Fossil Record (charlesfreelandpoetry.net) and his blog is Spring Cleaning in the Labyrinth of the Continuum (charlesfreeland.blogspot.com).