In July, 2010, poet and Zen priest Norman Fischer travelled to Kyoto to visit temples and meet with fellow practitioners. Escape This Crazy Life of Tears is a poetic journal of that trip.
Fischer’s poetry examines what it means to sit at the nexus of the past, present and future and links questions of being with vivid details of daily life. (It’s also sometimes very funny.) Fischer seeks to find a balance between past traditions (from the east) and new understandings (in the west).
Escape This Crazy Life of Tears stages a beautiful dialogue between inner thoughts and outward experiences that carefully observes the self, and opens an imaginative space in which to examine it.
Design by Allison Hanabusa
Kane`ohe, HI: TinFish Press (August 1, 2014)
“Who better to go to Kyoto with than Norman Fischer? Alive to time and beauty, attuned to mind’s actions, alert to the grain of the everyday. His capacity for bemusement and reverence, elegy and absurdity, turns the traveler’s dislocation into new modes of attention, registered in “wavering wordlets” and eloquent space. ”