Social Yet Distanced: Paul Corman Roberts Talks Bone Moon Palace, and Poetics with Dr. Fran Lock and an @emotionalorphan

Paul Corman Roberts Talks Bone Moon Palace, and Poetics with Dr. Fran Lock and an @emotionalorphan.

"Paul Corman-Roberts 2nd full-length collection of Bone Moon Palace will be released by Nomadic Press July 3rd of 2021. Previous collections include The Abomunauts Are Coming To Piss On Your Lawn (Howling Dog Press, 2006), Neocom(muter)(Tainted Coffee Press, 2009), 19th Street Station (Full of Crow Chap Series, 2011) and We Shoot Typewriters (Nomadic Press, 2015.) His short story “The Deathbed Confession of Christopher Walken” shortlisted for subTerrain Magazine’s 2010 fiction contest. A three-time Pushcart and Best of Web nominee, he currently teaches workshops for the Older Writer’s Lab in conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library as well as the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute. He sometimes fills in as drummer for the U.S. Ghostal Service."

Bone Moon Palace, like the ghost ship that its title poem commemorates, offers escape "not from everyone else but from everywhere else, a hiding place to be alone in sometimes." In these poems, you'll find community and solitude, candor and empathy, history and etymology. You'll find our oligarchy decoded; our mammalian nature disrobed. You'll find cold full moonlit nights and Darth Vader unsheathing his box cutters and so many beautifully-turned phrases: words tilled like soil to harvest a fresh poetic perspective. Enter the palace and behold, then, Corman-Roberts veering nimbly between jester and sage—dispensing "truth like smoke / disguised as tomfoolery."

Soma Mei-Sheng Frazier, 2017 San Francisco Library Laureate, author of Salve and Collateral Damage: A Triptych

Paul Corman-Roberts’ imagination is a responsible spirit leading people to their sharpened teeth. His imagination is my friend.

Riffs to live by wreathe poem after poem. Stowaway poems in this time of epochal shifts in the direction and velocity of social freight. You can find Corman-Roberts underneath cracking thousands of wishbones with all phantoms and phenomena that hegemony would have you ignore. Here is a tally for lovers of poems to enjoy.

Tongo Eisen-Martin, 8th San Francisco Poet Laureate, author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes and somebody is dead already

Paul Corman-Roberts’ words create a lush, lyrical roadmap to navigate a world where one can feel lost in a sideways sanity. With heart, hope, and humor as his magnetic north, Corman-Roberts leads us along roads teeming with ghosts, shape-shifters, poisonous CEOs, and investment bankers. Rather than imposing upon us a “one-way ticket to the abyss,” replete with Eden-less days where memes are the new media and democracy is pummeled by “thugocracy,” Corman-Roberts offers us a proverbial light at the end of our journey—that poetry can offer sanctuary, and that even amidst a crumbling empire, we “still need to be held / need to be cuddled / even in the squalor of our own dust.

Rich Ferguson, L.A. spoken-word performer, Beat Poet Laureate of California (2020–2022) and author of Everything is Radiant Between the Hates (Moon Tide Press, 2021)

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