Owlfeather Collective is pleased to announce the publication of Ralph Nazareth’s new poetry collection, Between Us the Long Road.
In conversation with himself and others he meets along the way, Nazareth confronts the bewildering dislocations and locations of suffering in our times. Particularly poignant are the poems from his visits to the Middle East, where he gives voice to complex emotional, spiritual and cultural issues in himself and the people he meets there. In one of these poems, “The Storyteller,” he hears:
If you begin to taste the bitterness
they carried in their hearts, you’ll have embarked
on the prayer we call listening,
stranger, India’s son, closer to me than brother.
In Between Us the Long Road , we as readers and listeners embark with him “on the prayer we call listening.”
The wonder & beauty of Ralph Nazareth’s book is a fierce balancing between the personal & historical, between borders, between blood & blood. These poems intertwine the author’s life with ‘the wild swings of history’ & so Between Us the Long Road demands our travel. Humanity should not forget the horrors but, somehow, usually does, & ‘In the middle of all this, who can remember / The universe is ours to make, unmake, re-make?’ Ralph Nazareth knows that to make it we must face brutality, embrace denials, celebrate desires, & realize we contribute to the slaughter. Yet what this book so powerfully communicates is that when we pay attention, the journey’s end is love.”
Duane Esposito, poet, Declaration for Your Bones
Ralph Nazareth is a poet and teacher. His book Ferrying Secrets was published in Hyderabad, India in 2005 and Cristal: Poems Selectos in Ecuador in 2015. He has taught for over four decades in schools, colleges, universities and maximum security prisons in the U.S. The managing Editor of Yuganta Press, he currently also heads GraceWorks, Inc. an international, nonprofit, charitable foundation. He lives with his wife Marianela Medrano in Stamford, CT.
Proceeds from the sale of this book support GraceWorks, Inc..
To buy Between Us the Long Road, you can send a check made out to GraceWorks, Inc. for $15 (includes shipping and handling) to GraceWorks, 6 Rushmore Circle, Stamford, CT 06905. You may also order it online at www.graceworksinternational.org. Go to “Support” and donate $15. The transaction will automatically issue you a receipt for your tax files as well as provide GraceWorks the address to mail you the book.