Bücher von Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Poetry. Fiction. California Interest. Classroom guide and introduction written by author inside. The brief narratives in ANIMAL CHILDREN by Hugh Behm-Steinberg work like a deceptively simple pinhole camera, a way of gazing at the deepest secrets of the heart through a lens of surrealism, humor, and pathos that renders clear that which is too intense, too personal, or too profound to be directly gazed upon. From the inner workings of 4-H clubs raising prize-winning nuns to the trials and tribulations of dating (and breaking up with) Death and Nature, to the insistence of cattle demanding to learn Kung Fu and people falling asleep during poetry readings, you will leave this book cleansed of your illusions, dazzled by hypnotic story-telling, and filled with a sense of wonder that lasts and lasts.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg's Shy Green Fields is in company with books by poets who wrote about glorious ordinary days in extraordinary times. In a pillowbook of a hundred seven-line poems, this life, as it is written, has the shadow of Robert Creeley's A Day Book behind it, and the shadow of Federico Lorca in his famous, reiterated line, "Green, I love you, green, ..." a specific, and pacific, emotional response in difficult political times. Behm-Steinberg's book is, likewise, carnal, primal, and intellectual. Shy Green Fields exults in experience, "Such versions!" --Jane Miller