Two reviews in for "Cyclones in High Northern Latitudes":


Depicting a waking, lucid dreamscape, the shifting interior cinema of lost love sets itself against the gathered debris of a recalled former life. Echoes of Hamsun's HUNGER congeal with Patchen's JOURNAL OF ALBION MOONLIGHT in a rich interior monologue, traipsing through the surreal landscape of memory ...

"I learned long ago
to distinguish between
strong memories and
whatever the world is ..."

Blurring the subjective/reality boundary, this is a phenomenological in-look freighted with the memories of a non-named woman, a love gone sour after a time of many kisses. Now the narrator, an outlaw on the run, hiding in cloisters, in a strange town with assumed name and face, remains sustained by these images of HER, even as the warnings indicate he is still being followed. His days reside in the "dilemma/of the broken hearted"; he begins to lose temporal perspective, a living exile from his past. He falls back to studying the indecipherable clouds ...

The collaborative narration weaves us through a shifting time-flux, a moving floor between memory-past and perception-present ... here, the outlaw is looking through a dirty Bowery window, perhaps after a day spent as an insurance clerk poring over columns of actuary tables in some vague city location ... there, we see him drinking the nepenthe of the village locals, full of his thoughts of yet a previous exiled life ... then a shifting retreat back to the actuary tables, which may hold the "traces ... of cyclones/in high northern latitudes ...

By the residue of high hope, the narrator prays that "one day you will/experience my love" - by which the shadow of longing transcends the mundanity of being a data entry clerk ...

The bold ink drawings by Rich Curtis round out this joint effort by two exemplary poets. Highly recommended reading ... 


                                                                                                                                                                                           Matt Hill



This is a modern book. A current collaboration. Jake Berry and Jeffrey Side have come together, along with the artist Rich Curtis to lead us through a journey of the stratosphere that include algorithms, the dogs of cognizance, actuary tables and a glimpse of 50 worlds passing.

 The poets write, "I have difficulty believing that I, in another time and form, created them myself." Then a few pages later write, "...and I can see the clouds forming now and a storm brewing."

 These storms are cyclones like the title suggests. Whirling from the marshes and up into the adrenaline of the clouds. The reader gets caught up in the earth, immigrants in an orchard shrouded by dunes.

 Cyclones In High Northern Latitudes delivers on the titles suggestion of flight. As John Steinbeck wrote, "The very air here is miraculous."


                                                                                                                                                                                       Chris Mansel