The Dao De Jing is a classic of ancient Chinese philosophy and one of the great wisdom texts of world literature. To recover its original meaning P. J. Laska sets aside the long commentarial tradition of paradox and mysticism and re-interprets the work as a coherent natural philosophy and holistic ecological teaching concerned with the "constancy" of the life community as a whole. In this new translation and commentary the ancient "Way of the Sages" is presented as biocentric political ecology teaching that "Great governance does not cut," but acts to protect the community of life from the...

MORNING IN AMERICA is challenging poetic work asking readers to entertain the possibility that the past is not, as Aristotle said, "that which has been," but is instead that which has been lifted from the crypt to serve the purposes of the future-blind. That the past lives on in memory and inertial repetition is not news. That it has been reanimated with the help of financial steroids to enable the fossilized to lord it over the living is a 21st Century reality for this eco-conscious political poet whose anti-lyric and dialogue assemblages seek to re-dimension the scope and creative...