Bücher von Bill Meissner

In "The Mapmaker and His Woman," the mapmaker narrator travels, in a few short hours, to Budapest, Salamanca, Punta Cana and Dusseldorf, but always returns home to the woman he loves. In another poem, Harry Houdini's critics attempt to suppress his opinions and negate his magical powers. In "The Groundskeeper's Teenage Daughters," young girls speak out against their domineering, controlling father. A prize-winning poem features the haunting voice of the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, who talks about her image appearing in her favorite mirror and how it effects the men who see it. The poems take you to variety of unique places: to a small Mexican village in the Yucatan, to the treacherous Gulf waters between Cuba and Florida, to a traveling carnival, to Bob Dylan's north country back roads, to outer space, a million miles from earth, then back to the isolated county roads in the rural heartland. Many poems focus on personal experiences, including childhood incidents and relationships with mothers, fathers and lovers. One section of the book, entitled "Borders: In Some Other Country," throws a spotlight on political and social issues, with wry and poignant poems about the repression of free speech, the use of nuclear weapons, gender roles, and the prevalence of gun violence. Another section in the collection features characterizations of famous American icons such as Albert Einstein, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, James Dean, and the 19th century classic poet, Walt Whitman. These poems reverberate beyond the celebrities to make unique comments about American life and culture. Sometimes comic, sometimes poignant, the poems in The Mapmaker's Dream take you on journeys to places you never expected to go, and to characters you never dreamed you'd meet.

When Bill Meissner's collection of short stories Hitting into the Wind was published in 1994, it was called "e;a quiet masterpiece of baseball writing"e; by the Greensboro, North Carolina, News and Record. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer said, "e;Bill Meissner captures baseball with all its crystalline beauty-the remarkable reverberation of time and space and character."e; And The New York Times Book Review said, "e;Just about every tale here recalls those precious years when a chance to play in the majors was all a boy could ask from life."e; Now, in his first novel, Bill Meissner again uses baseball as a window to his characters. In Spirits in the Grass, we meet Luke Tanner, a thirty-something ball player helping to build a new baseball field in his beloved hometown of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Luke looks forward to trying out for the local amateur team as soon as possible. His chance discovery of a small bone fragment on the field sets in motion a series of events and discoveries that will involve his neighbors, local politicians, and the nearby Native American reservation. Luke's life, most of all, will be transformed. His growing obsession with the ball field and what's beneath it threatens his still fragile relationship with his partner, Louise, and challenges Luke's assumptions about everyone, especially himself. Spirits in the Grass rings true with small-town Midwestern values. The characters, including Luke's independent partner Louise, grapple with their passion and their identities. In this beautiful and haunting novel, baseball serves as a metaphor for life itself, with its losses and defeats, its glories and triumphs.

Explores the consciousness of Cosmos, USA, a small town that is anything but ordinary. Though it has its share of residents intent on keeping the world on an even keel, Cosmos is blessed with a healthy number of eccentrics who are chasing their dreams, idiosyncratic as they may be, or struggling to distinguish themselves as individuals.