The Ambulatorium

Continuing the western tradition of "bastard ghazals" that do not hold to the form or intent of the 13thcentury Sufi mystics who wrote of religious devotion and erotic longing, these poems are collagestracing a route at the edges of suburban houses filled with doppelganger children, county jails andflophouse hotels, Sonny Liston and Geechie Wiley, Maurice Sendak and the Lindburgh baby, PhilipGuston, Willie Bobo, recidivist airline stowaways, and the numinous messages left between the cloudsand garbage dumpsters.These poems breathe in a space framed by psychoanalyst Michael Eigen: "We are part of one greatparadoxical monism, a wholeness that thrives on fragmentary processes, bits and pieces throbbing withsignificance," and the poet Charles Simic, "The poem is an attempt at self-recovery, self-recognition, self-remembering, the marvel of being again... A poem is a piece of the unutterable whole."