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HITCHHIKING BEATITUDES · MICHAEL MCINNIS
$10.00
In Hitchhiking Beatitudes, McInnis gathers the strange and dangerous jewell-pieces from a North American sojourn for the new century. But this journey is not linear, nor is it rooted in traditional notions of geography, time, or meaning. Rather this visionary collection celebrates the hallucinatory, spasmodic fruition of the western psyche awakening in its ontological seizure. In McInnis we hear the godson of the French Symbolists and the American Beats now chanting in the psychic bounty of the desert, the imagined land. This mad and angelic volume offers us an opening to the ultimate journey: the thousand pathways toward ecstasy.
George Eklund, Professor Emeritus, Morehead State University
| Weight | 5 oz |
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Read excerpts
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I ate granola and apples and slept in wooded interchanges, menaced by mosquitoes, aware of the sky.
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Utah was like driving on the moon, she said. New Zealand, where she was from, was like driving on another planet. She had traveled much further than me. I had yet to leave the stratosphere.
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Dull Knife and Little Wolf sold pottery at the Four Corners and collected tokens at Roadside America, Santa’s Village and Wall Drug. We’re all tourists in Indian Country now.
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There were holes in the sky over Groom Lake, Trinity and inside the hangars of Wright-Patterson. Glass in the sand cut my feet.
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He had driven a van full of live chickens all night and asked if I could drive a three on the tree. Every time I popped the clutch, it felt like a flightless bird had lurched into oblivion.
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The state trooper said what are you doing on my fucking interstate. Thundering trucks, lit like alien Christmas trees, barreled out of the darkness.
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If Plimoth Plantation were historically accurate, they would kill the leader of the local Indians and stick his head on a pole by the gate.
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In Newfoundland, to appease the rocks and rivers, to placate the trees and lichen, to honor the stars screaming across the sky, I stripped and came on the stomach of the earth.
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At l’Anse aux Meadows, the icebergs waited ten thousand years for a longship, the wind divorced from the sky.
About the Author
Michael McInnis lives in Boston and served in the Navy chasing white whales and Soviet submarines. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in Chiron Review, Cream City Review, Naugatuck Review, Oxford Magazine, Unlikely Stories and Yellow Chair Review to name a few. His third book, Secret Histories, was published by Cervená Barva Press.
Interviews, Reviews, Media
Copyright © 2017 Michael McInnis
Cover photograph from the collection of Lauren Leja
ISBN 978-0-692-86923-9
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
