ALICE HICKEY: Between Worlds

by Justin Spring

John Ringling Towers Award for Literary ArtsALICE HICKEY is a dizzying, sometimes troubling story about two people flung together by inexplicable psychic forces. Poet Justin Spring is rummaging through a bin of tomatoes in a Florida supermarket when an elderly woman, a complete stranger, approaches him and seemingly speaks to him from inside his mind. Stunned, he instinctively knows the voice was not of this world, but before he can regain his composure, the woman disappears into the parking lot without a word of explanation. In the months that follow, he is assailed by a series of equally mysterious events. Just when he fears he is about to lose his grip on reality, the elderly woman mysteriously reappears, identifies herself as psychic Alice Hickey and begins to methodically unwind the poet’s tangled skein of voices, visions, spirits, treasure divers, psychics, psychiatrists, poets, strippers, scholars, and archeologists to show him what the psychic world has been trying to communicate—that a new consciousness is evolving—one that is more spiritual, more artistic, more balanced between intuition and reason. This is a totally unpredictable story about the roots of human consciousness, the psychic roots of poetry, the early Mother Goddess period, and our constantly evolving consciousness—but even more than that, it is a story about an extraordinary friendship that blossomed on the unruly border between the two worlds. __________________________________________________________Here’s what readers are saying about ALICE Between “Few books allow us to really feel what encounters with the psychic world are like. Castaneda comes to mind, of course, and that is his enduring gift to us. Here is a book that has that same power, but it is not set in the austere Sonora desert, but the nutty, everyday world of poet Justin Spring who brings us smack into his humpty-dumpty world of supermarkets, intuitives, treasure hunters, bars, poets, preachers, Starbucks, pawnshops, drunks and dopers as he travels between Florida, Sedona, California, Mexico, Panama, and the Florida Keys trying to make sense of a series of psychic events triggered by a mysterious encounter with psychic Alice Hickey. This is a book you won’t want to put down. It is visionary in its scope and devilish in its pace.”Scylla Liscombe Director Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press“This is a book that masterfully crisscrosses reality and fantasy until they blur into each other completely. I would say the same for the writer and for most of the characters portrayed, including myself. Maybe especially myself. It is a book that shuttles back and forth from head to heart, never missing a beat. Welcome to the world of the mystical. It is no more or less crazy and funny and engaging than the world we call real life.” Joan AdleyAuthor, Intuitive

306 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 14, 2011

About the author

Justin Spring is a New York based writer specializing in twentieth-century American art and culture. He is the author of many monographs, catalogs, museum publications, and books, including the biography Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art (Yale University Press, 2000) and Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude (Universe, 2002). He has been the recipient of a number of grants, fellowships, and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the International Association of Art Critics Best Show Award. He has held research fellowships from Yale University, Brown University, Radcliffe College and Amherst College. His monograph on Paul Cadmus was a finalist for the Lamda Literary Award in Art History.