Featuring forty-four poems covering more than forty years of creative output, R. Bentz Kirby’s Dream Work offers one author’s creative quest to describe his vision of the truth and beauty found while traversing the landscape both of the human soul and the natural world surrounding us, and perhaps even the world beyond this one.

That’s right: Kirby has been to the other side and back. After being clinically dead for several minutes following a 2012 Sudden Cardiac Arrest event, thanks to quick-acting loved ones, bystanders and EMT first responders, Bentz’s heartbeat resumed and allowed him to return to his normal, happy life–a small miracle.

And once he fully recovered his health, he found the experience of dying not only filled his soul with gratitude at getting another chance, but had also opened a portal of post-event creativity, as well as shedding new light and insight on earlier poems and songs he’d written.

With this slice of personal history in mind, Dream Work presents an amalgamation of work depicting less a before and after phase of one human’s life than a totality of experience, including the briefest of glimpses through the veil surrounding the eternally mysterious transition of human consciousness from life into death.

From the introduction by Worthy Evans: These dreams and these journeys are indeed the poet’s. But gratefully, Bentz has written down these journeys, and they are boxes that are opened up, for us to look over, and maybe consider what our own journeys and dreams may reveal to us.