Rustin Larson's Blog, page 9
May 25, 2022
May 13, 2022
A Poem from 2018
Happy Mother’s Day!
During the summer of 2017 I participated in a project where I wrote a sonnet every day for a month. This was a big challenge. I had just graduated from college and was living with my parents for the summer before moving to Indianapolis, Indiana. Though the poems I wrote that month shifted out of strict sonnets, the spirit of the form remains. I wrote this poem about my mother. It was published online in New Limestone Review.
You can view this poem online here.
May 4, 2022
Mysterious Island: Conestoga Zen Press Paperback – March 22, 2022
He reminds us of the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges: “A piano, / With its keys locked under its cover, / Is some giant creature / At the bottom of the sea, /Waiting.” Like a painter saturating the colors of Earth, exalting its geography from delirious beauty to war nightmares, Larson takes the reader on a dreamlike journey, filled with flashbacks, family memories, and ghosts. The Philosopher Savant is a moving and powerful tribute to the past, bittersweet, funny, and heartbreaking. Themes of absence, loss and abandonment are set against a backdrop of fire and ice, in a landscape whose gardens, blooming with geraniums, lilies, marigolds, lilac, roses, orchids, honeysuckle and thistle, in “gangrened earth,” are reminiscent of Richard Matheson’s novel and Vincent Ward’s movie What Dreams May Come. Melancholic, unflinching and unexpected, The Philosopher Savant, haunted by the likes of Proust, Crane, Whitman, Shihab Nye, Keats and Shakespeare, upon whose shoulders Larson rests, pulsates like jazz and celebrates life. — Hélène Cardona in Verseville
He makes everything greater because he’s a smart singer, every poem is a win. Moments shine with an unselfconscious voice. We cannot imagine how easily paint can be applied if we just speak in real time of consequential things with a depth of heart. Within that modest framework the passage of words has a capability and a sphere of influence without limits. The poetry dynamics here are a genuine voice, believable encounters, and the ability to make everything new with the belief that no one’s watching you, and nothing can come of it, and there’s nothing to get. This is poetry at its best. –Grace Cavalieri in The Washington Independent Review of Books
April 27, 2022
Recently Received Books
Updated: 4/24/22 – Available
Poetry- Flower Mountain by Rustin Larson – New Chicago Press
Poetry- Receta by Mario Jose Pagan Morales – Great Weather For Media
Poetry-On Earth As It It by Michael Todd Steffen – Cervena Barva Press
Poetry-Let’s Call It Paradise by Mike Maggio – San Francisco Bay Press
Poetry- Muddying the Holy Waters by Choclate Waters- Eggplant Press
Poetry- The Path to Kindness-Poems of Connection and Joy Edited by James Crews-Storey Books.
Poetry- Hello I Must Be Going by David Hernandez – University of Pittsburgh Press
Poetry- Verdant by Jeffery Beam- kin press
Poetry- Ante body by Marwa Helal – Nightboat Books
Novel: Elephants In Our Yard by Meral Kureyshi Translated by Robert Cantrick – Noumena Press
Novel- Steller’s Orchid by Tom McGuire – Red Hen Press
Creative Nonfiction – Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit by Judy Grahn – Red Hen Press
Memoir- The book of Timothy: The…
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April 20, 2022
The Cottage on the Hill
Exciting news. My chapbook, The Cottage on the Hill, has been published in India by Cyberwit.net. https://www.cyberwit.net/authors/rustin-larson
April 14, 2022
Thrilled to be interviewed by Mitali Chakravarty in Borderless Journal April 14th, 2022 – When a Hobo in a Fedora Hat Breathes Tolkien…
Poetry by Strider Marcus Jones
When a Hobo in a Fedora Hat Breathes Tolkien…‘My Lothlorien is a more peaceful world, with more tolerance of other individuals and cultures. Not perfect by any stretch but a place where people laugh, have their neighbours back and work with each other. A place of social justice and equality, music, poetry and art.’
In conversation with Strider Marcus Jones
i’m come home again
in your Lothlorien
Strider Marcus Jones wrote these lines about an idyllic utopia that was named Lothlorien by JRR Tolkien inLord of the Rings. Jones writes beautiful poetry that touches the heart with its music and lyricality and recreates a world that hums with peace, beauty, acceptance and tolerance – values that have become more precious than gems in the current world of war, strife and distress. He has created his own Lothlorien in the form of a journal which he has…
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April 11, 2022
April 8, 2022
Two Poems by Rustin Larson
.Lawn Ornament.Buddha, seated with four disciples, looks like my grandmother, same squarish face and long earlobes, same hairdo, topknot she’d putunder a net before she went to work at the egg plant, the disassembly line, so to speak, white ovals conveyed for candling and thenpowdering for armed forces overseas. After work she’d slip on Buddha’s housecoat– a few ocher stripes, some emblems of orchids– shewould drink her tea, silently, ceremoniously, the center of a circle of ghosts..Carroll Street.in Brooklyn is probably still there, as familiar to millions as Ingersoll is to me. The fall turns to parchment. Every leaf is blank. Every leafhas something written on it, held under a slanted evening light. In a slanted evening light in Brooklyn someone sips Irish Creme from asnifter and lays down a pair of hearts. Someone shoots the moon; another person is sure she has…View original post 381 more words
April 2, 2022
“Wealth” in The Lake
RUSTIN LARSONWealth
Gar the orange tabby sits
on the kitchen table
and watches notes of music
float from the radio.
The notes look like
little puffs of smoke
because he has this expression
of watching something
dissolve in wonder.
The station plays Mozart,
still the best music
after hundreds of years.
The music fills bank accounts
of wandering ghosts.
It is the tears of the horizon,
the evening stars of late autumn,
the fire in the yard
of the black and red chickens.
I accept it, even though
there is also this beeping
of a world going backwards–
a garbage truck delivering
instead of picking up.
Still there’s the evolving
smoke of music, the wondering
eyes of an orange cat.
Rustin Larson has been published recently in London Grip, Poetryspace: spring 2022 showcase, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. His latest books are Slap and Anvilhead, both published by Alien Buddha Press in 2021. __ATA.cmd.push(function() { __ATA.initDynamicSlot({ id: 'atatags-26942-624907e5624c4', location: 120, formFactor: '001', label: { text: 'Advertisements', }, creative: { reportAd: { text: 'Report this ad', }, privacySettings: { text: 'Privacy', onClick: function() { window.__tcfapi && window.__tcfapi( 'showUi' ); }, } } }); });
