Bücher von Corey Mesler

Fiction. Music. DIDDY-WAH-DIDDY: A BEALE STREET SUITE is a crazy-quilt mosaic about a near-mythical place located, concretely, in Memphis, Tennessee, and abstractly somewhere on the road between Rapture and Perdition. The novel is a-historic, preferring the beautiful lie to the truth as plain as a mud fence. The novel, if we can call it a novel (and we can), is peopled with musicians, conmen, strippers, magi, foreigners, storytellers, ghosts, villains, heroes, fairy-tale sons of Adam like Elvis and Santa Claus, and the imps of the perverse. Told in myriad ways, including short stories, plays, and poems, the song Diddy Wah Diddy moves from Creation to Revelation and, in the end, emerges from the smoke and circus mirrors, to stand naked under the bright, bluesy Beale Street sun.

Opaque Melodies That Would Bug Most People is filled with young, vibrant poems from a wise voice. The poems often wax reflective, filled with the historicity of experience, yet always returning to the now. Thus, Mesler's collection is defined by beautiful immediacy, intimacy, and urgency. Constantly, these poems remind the reader what it means to be human, to be alive and living surrounded by a multitude of beating hearts and breathing lungs. While each poem recounts a snippet of life, together the poems create an earthy blanket that connects readers to a single mind whose voice throughout remains delicate, concrete, and vital, like an old friend. The verse engages the commonplace and the abstract with equal measures thoughtfulness. Each piece builds and builds until, by the end, the reader has experienced a life, and come away refreshed, having experienced hopeful energy.