Another Way Home

I love the way Beau Beausoleil's poems catch hold of the invisible. They always travel to a mysterious place that transcends the appearances of the world. He reveals what cannot be expressed with ordinary language - sometimes the grief of life, sometimes the joy, sometimes what you can only see in a dream. His work embodies the inventiveness of the Language Poets but goes further, leading us through the images with a compelling narrative voice and a luminous spiritual vision. Another Way Home contains his best new writing.

- Diane Frank, Author of While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems", Chief Editor, Blue Light Press.

Beau Beausoleil's poems are impassioned daily engagements with the muse and act of poetry-making, and with the self: its losses, yearnings, regrets, love, elations, and intimations of mortality, with others, on buses and street corners, where he intuits the emotions of everyday life, lived as part of a whole personal life.He also engages with the wider world of his country's history, its 'treachery and disappointments', which 'end in grief'.

Courageous and beautiful poems of witness, wisdom, honesty and remarkable emotional acuity.

-Maysoon Pachachi, Filmmaker

The smallest poem in this collection asks us to feel what it means to be human...how to love, how to grieve, how to hope and how to share the world. Each poem becomes part of our own memories of how we ourselves have experienced the world. As you read these, you too will fly with Javier in the back yard of an evening. You will be lifted, and you will be certain that our shared humanity is what gives us hope and makes us resilient.

-Terry Schupbach-Gordon, is an artist, printer, storyteller, puppeteer, artists' book maker, and co-director of Catbird (on the Yadkin) Press in North Carolina.

Poetry is the dramatization of a voice. Beau Beausoleil's Another Way Home is the voice of a traveler who must go on even as they long for their travels to end. It is the voice of one who sees everything in terms of centuries and yet must, condemned like all of us, live day to day. It knows that existence flows between the riverbanks of love and cruelty, and beauty is the water that joins them. It is the voice of one who knows we have nothing but words to leave behind, and speaks in bursts as thin and precious as a last breath.

-Richard Harrison, poet, author of On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood.