The epigraph from Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse sets the tone for Todd Crawshaw's strange, daring, and beautiful collection of StoryPoems, Light-Years in the Dark. Meant for those who seek inspiration and the meaning of life, the book takes readers on a vital metaphysical and spiritual journey through both darkness and light. A StoryPoem, defined by the author, is a hybrid genre of poetry and short story inspired by Cranes' The Black Riders & Other Lines and Debussy's Preludes for Piano, where each concise piece is a cosmos, a distilled symphony. In Light-Years in the Dark,...

John Lazard Slater III, known simply as John, or Slater (or Satyr to his fans and foes, once upon a time), crash-lands after falling from the sky onto a freeway overpass. Thus ends, and begins, a biographical tale about mental, physical and spiritual seduction. The tragic and comic chronicles of a man who belatedly discovers he was procreated by members of a cult, marrying genetic technology with ancient artifacts, to initiate the Second Coming of Christ. Imagine a fast-forward-reverse-pause world where the past and the future intermingle with present consciousness. And a bio-computer with...