The three (so far) collections of poetry by Mario Milosevic. Each contains original and reprinted poems on a particular subject. Charles de Lint has called Mario his favorite poet. We think there’s a good chance you’ll agree with that assessment.
Love is that sobering and paradoxical state of being in which one’s own happiness depends upon the welfare of another. Mario’s third volume of poetry examines love in its many guises: familial, romantic, and Platonic. This is probably the most personal of all his books. He writes of his eternal and sustaining love for Kim. He has a poem about the fierce and caring love of his mother for him. He writes of the occasional failures of love: the time his father came looking for him, for a connection, and he did not know how to respond. We are born craving love, but we have to learn to give love, and sometimes the lessons are difficult to assimilate. The book is presented in three section: “Preliminary Observations,” “Field Work,” and “Practical Application.” These are the three stages of learning to love. As young people we see others and how they love, but do not understand. As we grow older, we begin to see how love is a force of nature. Finally, if we have been paying attention, we are ready to love others truly and well. Available in these formats: print • kindle • nook • smashwords
Barbie’s retirement. A weeping Bigfoot. Gambling fairies. Love sick giants. All this and more in a book of poems exploring the fantastic side of life. This is where Mario let his imagination really run free. Unhindered by conventional notions of reality (whatever that means) he writes poems about monogamous house keys, the moon in his living room, and the secret lives of telephones. They have them, you know. When you’re not looking, they laugh at you. But don’t worry, they aren’t nasty or dangerous or anything like that. They’re just kind of melancholy with the weight of all the words they have to carry around, and they need some humor to relieve their heavy hearts. Read more about it in this volume, along with ghost stories, angels, a cosmic glutton, Pegasus, Albert Einstein, and Ray Harryhausen. Really. Available in these formats: print • kindle • nook • smashwords
Mario says: “I wanted to put together a book of my poems and started going through the ones I had written up to then, looking for good ones that would go together. It didn’t take long to see that I had many many poems about animals. I had no idea this was such an important theme for me, but I didn’t fight it. I came up with the title almost immediately after seeing the theme pop out at me. I could have made the book twice as big, with a lot more animal poems, but chose to include only the very best ones I had.” This collection contains “When I Was,” Mario’s most popular and often requested poem. People use it for religious rituals and it was dramatised on NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge. Mario drew the cover image myself, mimicking the look of the native petroglyphs gracing many of the rocks in the Columbia River Gorge. Available in these formats: print • kindle • nook • smashwords