<div><div> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>Todd Hearon's haunting debut collection chronicles the twin paths of isolation and desire in the search for meaning and union with others. On his pilgrimage through the lost worlds of earth and the soul, the speaker encounters drought in both the literal and spiritual sense as he confronts desolate landscapes, from the brown remnants of ruined cities, to the depths of the human heart and man's capacity for utter destruction. Yet even though he frequently encounters darkness, he never ceases to seek beauty. He is a man who wears many faces, from Adam, staring down a bleak future bereft of Paradise, to the doomed poet Shelley, drowned off the coast of Italy. He speaks as a man adrift in his own life, seeking an answer to his emptiness, an estranged traveler through memory and longing. Lyrical and intense, <I>Strange</I><I> Land</I> is a quest for understanding and human connection.<B></B></P> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt"><B></B> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt"> </P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle><B>Strange Land </B></P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>It goes without saying</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>a word:  the world under cover</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>of midnight snow, what we have known</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle> </P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>of pageantry and lilac, leaf and song</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>subsumed in starless silence.</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>Waking at dawn into the tremulous blue</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle> </P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>of the room, as in earth's afterglow,</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>we lie, lidless, listening, as crows</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>call out the ear's horizons.</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle> </P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>What year is it?  Into what country were we born</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>and now must make our way?  Outside the pane</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>the stillness feels ancestral but the ghosts</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle> </P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>not yours, not mine.  My émigré,</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>we are cut off.  An ocean to the east</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>churns in chiaroscuro while unseen</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle> </P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>ranges to the south deflect our passage,</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>what passage might have been.</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>This country seems the passing of a dream</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle> </P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>to a moonscape's still immitigable white,</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>a land's amnesia where against the sky</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>three needling black birds fly</P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle> </P> <P class=MsoNormalCxSpMiddle>and slip like an ellipsis out of sight.</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt; LINE-HEIGHT: normal"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: normal"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: normal"> </P> <P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt"> </P></DIV></DIV>