Lessons of Darkness

Alan Catlin has been publishing poetry, fiction, reviews and the odd collage in littles, independents, and university magazines since the 70's. He can say, with complete confidence, that he is the only poet in the world to have published in Random Weirdness, Tray Full of Lab Mice, Yammering Twits, The Seattle Review, Wisconsin Review, Descant, The Literary Review and Wordsworth's Socks. He has won several chapbook contests including the Slipstream one and been a finalist in several major university book contests. He lost count after thirty Pushcart nominations and has been nominated for Best of the Net, Rhysling and Bram Stoker awards. As a poet of many voices, he has published full-length collection reflecting his work as professional barman that included the recent triptych of Carpe Diem books: Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged (Roadside Press), Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell (Roadside Press) and Last Call for Lazarus (Impspired). His American Odyssey and Wild Beauty from Future Cycle Press examined the American Experience. The third in this series of art and life was published by Dos Madres as Asylum Garden: after Van Gogh. His life and times of Diane Arbus was a labor of love brought to fruition by Kelsay Books as How Will the Heart Endure? An eleven-chapbook series of "movie poems" was recently completed with three volumes of three chapbooks each ,plus two others separate little books including the Slipstream Contest Winner, Blue Velvet. The working title of those was Hollyweird, and extended a year's long project of social commentary disguised as bar poems called Alien Nation. A covid project of numbered prose like snap shot poems was published by Dos Madres as Memories Too, and represents what happens when the narrative impulse dies in isolation. His fictional memoir, a retirement project that began and finished before Covid, Chaos Management, was published by Alien Buddha. He is currently culling his vast archives for the forgotten and the lost over decades of creation. A recent discovery assembled into book form is The Work Anxiety Poems which includes uncollected work experience poems, and actual anxiety dreams about that experience, all of which happened after he retired.