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This is a collection that calls for ceremony. I’d like to gather my beloved band of misfits, go out in search of a wrecked old building, build a small fire, gather around, and read Beggar’s Songbook aloud together inside the crumbling walls. The poems in Beggar’s Songbook are elegies, turnkeys, reckonings with un-birth, pipe bombs, hexes, correspondences with the poltergeists of memory, and invitations: to claw open the petroleum-stained soil with our faulty human hands, to find the seeds that might still grow. They are trembling meditations, tributes to the doomed, tender and howling offerings of forgiveness, excavations of the bound body, entreaties of personal and planetary liberation. They are confessions that vibrate with pounding fists of an ego that will not be permitted to enter. They are chronicles of wreckage. They are possibilities that ascend only from such wreckage. Like the Coyote in his poem Sights Unseen, Nathanael William Stolte’s poems shape-change and [Tell] the truth with a diamond tongue / Sharp and precise. In other words, amidst those of us who confuse self-loathing for humility, Stolte has written a book of subterranean prayers that blaze with gasoline-soaked candor. Though unholy stenches may rise from our throats, Beggar’s Songbook shakes and growls and whimpers us awake, humbles us to name what is unnamed within ourselves, and implores us to recognize the miracle of our own breath.
-Rebecca Nison (poet, writer, educator)
You don’t know what to expect sometimes… This tall earnest guy among drunken Buffalo (NY)…
i think we hung out first cuz he knew a good diner… one day he hands me a book and says,
my first chapbook! Tell me what you think sometime!
Hmmm… It’s a risk. I like Nathanael. We DO share a taste for writers… I pick a title… Hmm…Flip thru…scan…hmmm…ok!
Greek mythology pagans in the moonlight
talk like film noir romance.
Copper haired women and ghosts who speak only in dreams.
Blood and gunmetal colored skies.
A pipe with a medicine man behind the funeral home.
The light of ancient gods
cast upon the endless snow of childhood and forever broken cars.
Yes buddy, there’s reasons…More than I’d thought.
It makes sense you knew a good all night diner.
-Vic Ruggiero (singer/songwriter, The Slackers)
