How Therapists Dance follows the numinous thread described by Novalis:

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

As in the first poem, in which snails scrawl the names of Buddhas with their silvery trails and ends with the poet kissing his wife's hands, taking out the garbage, and being confronted with an overwhelming moon. These poems stitch together psychiatric ward encounters with the musings of security guards in an art gallery; an urban dance floor provoking a breakthrough for a stranded...

Kung Fu of the Dark Father presents not only the poet's father, the author's own enigmas, but also a veritable lineage of men confronting what Lorca describes as the duende in art and life--mythology's insistence that one must enter the underworld before there is any hope of bearing light. Here we meet a destruction derby hero, the Rolling Stones, Freud's cocaine habit, Meriwether Lewis' less than heroic return from the great West; St. Augustine, Copernicus, Hemingway's third son--each facing a darkness that poetry helps bear. There are also wild gurus, wandering monks--a...