The poems of Exile In Paradise are derived from a lifelong appreciation of classical Chinese poetry. This selection by Pat Nolan marks an almost fifty year creative engagement with Asian literature in translation. Chinese poetry is image rich and largely dependent for its overall effect on the juxtaposition of these images in a discontinuous thread that is not unlike the successive frames of a film. Each of the poems finds its origin in a line translated from an ancient Chinese poet. Although removed by degrees of separation from the originals in time and language, their impulse remains the same: to call up the perceptual as a song of celebration in sacred engagement with the world. Limited quantities available.

The Thousand Marvels of Every Moment, A Tanka Collection by Pat Nolan. Tanka is the modern name for a short five line poem known throughout the history of Japanese literature as a waka. The short poems of the thousand marvels of every moment are composed of five lines in two stanzas.  The first stanza balances on the second, sometimes precariously, to pose a distinguishing match. The break between stanzas acts as a gap for synaptic sparks to jump. It also emphasizes its call and response origins serving as a binary exchange of verbal energy.  The two last lines in these poems tend to resolve them either as parallel breaths or as a single run-on semantic declaration. Second printing.

The eleven haikai no renga included in Poetry For Sale were written over period of nearly thirty years by Pat Nolan and his renku collaborators, Keith Kumasen Abbott, Sandy Berrigan, Gloria Frym, Steven Lavoie, Joen Eshima Moore, Maureen Owen, Michael Sowl, and John Veglia. This collection of linked poetry presents a fascinating excursion in comparative literature by a cross-section of exceptional, widely-published American poets.  What these poets bring to the collaborative linking of stanzas is a visceral sense of the poetic that transcends two disparate languages and the gap of centuries. In these pages haikai no renga is synthesized as a brief, highly suggestive, well spoken, maddeningly ambiguous, read-between-the-lines kind of poetry tuned to a common understanding. Second printing. Limited quantities available.

On The Road To Las Cruces is a work of fiction tethered loosely to historical fact.  It is the story of the relationship between two men, one garrulous, the other taciturn, the Mutt and Jeff of the old Southwest, and the tradition of storytelling and the authoring of ‘true’ accounts.  What is related on the road to Las Cruces is as much a retelling of some history as it is how such a retelling might come about, and is represented in the manner of a tall tale, the deadpan details of a crime story, melodrama, and a conspiracy to murder. Along the way, when the tools of law include deadly force, there are bound to be killings. However there are no showdowns, no heroics, no fancy horsemanship, no arduous adversity, merely pain and regret, bitterness and rancor, and the consequences of another misstep. It is a tragedy that lends itself to allegory. Limited quantities available.

Ode To Sunset, A Year In The Life of American Genius is a story told in the American pulp fiction vernacular. The novel is not autobiographical nor is it a roman á clef. As retro-pulp, the composition reflects the methods of Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO group as well as those of the mysterious Raymond Roussel, with a nod to Flann O’Brien and Laurence Sterne. No actual poets were named in the writing of this fiction with the exception of dead poets who serve as historical or literary markers as is often required of dead poets. As an eight second David Mamet pitch, think of Ode To Sunset, A Year in the Life of American Genius as “A Confederacy of Dunces meets The Savage Detectives with voiceover by George Steiner.” Published in 2025, copies are still available.