Mirrors
None of the poetry in Mirrors directly relate to May 4, 1970 but Mac, Ben, Steve and Rochelle relate to it and it relates to them. What they are, what they create, contain the threads of a humanity that will forever be part of the May 4 tapestry woven since that day in 1970. And Kendra and I can relate to that.

Click above on each poet's name and travel with them for a bit. For the full journey stop back in late July and we'll tell you how to get a copy of Mirrors

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Below is the introduction to Mirrors written by renowned Ohio poet Maj Ragain.     

These three poets, Mac Lojowsky, Ben Pershey and Steve Skovensky, walk the abandoned railroad tracks, telling these stories to one another, to us.  They are on a journey.  Mac knows how it works: 'Our destination is / the starting point'.  Hear Ben: 'Keep it simple,  Check the mailbox of your heart'. Steve's words: 'To move when so many sleep, / to continue on, find new life, / wrestle this poem to its knees'. Check the mailbox of this book.  Find poems.  'There is something I want to tell you about.' writes Ben.  They tell us about the struggle to find faith in the world, the early morning ritual of the quite father, the firm, loving hands of the mother, the haunting by 'beautiful and lost' women, the heartache of trying to 'turn it all into love.' the waterlogged skull carried down river.  Those poets show us what to throw away. what to keep, where to lie down, where to find the war.   There are lessons--that of 'humility. building our homes on the fly'--how to sustain a life, 'Don't let the wine swallow your heart, or your heart swallow your mind--how destruction of the natural world strikes at the inner world, clear-cut hills, clear-cut heart.  We learn to read the weather, the outer, the inner, in the sky of the poems, to understand the brotherhood of 'messing with cars in winter.'  We hear poem prayers to the grocery store Madonna, the poet lashed to the 'witches wheel,' turning in small circles.
     These poems are tonic. Tout Press is glad to help get them out to the world.  Listen hard.  Live now.  What is true no two men know.   What is gone is gone.

                                          Maj Ragain
                                          Kent, Ohio
                                          April   25, 1999