Overview

Cartoons for the Chaos collects over a half-century of poems that address the ever present chaos of our lives, both public and private, and the emotional, political, and environmental disasters that challenge us on a daily basis. Yet perspective is everything. These poems provide models for how to (and not to) deal with conditions that, if they cannot be cured must be endured. These are poems that move us with their empathy, delight us with their irreverence, provide us respite with their beauty, anger us with their confrontation with cruelty, and stir us to think deeply with their humor. At the conclusion of a lecture Collins once gave at a Romanian university, someone wrote on the blackboard: RIDENDO DICERE VERUM, a Latin tag from Horace that means roughly: ""Laughing he tells the truth."" In this collection Collins sees the chaos for what it is in cartoons that can make us laugh until we cry and vice versa. A former professor and dean who has taught in many parts of the world, and currently a Zen monk practicing in the mountains of Tennessee, Richard Collins reflects on a world aflame and imparts what shreds of insight he has gathered over a lifetime on how to fight fire, sometimes with fire, sometimes with ire, sometimes with satire, but always with passion, compassion, and above all, laughter.

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9781971191027

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Reviews

""Cartoons for the Chaos is a selection of Richard Collins's wise and beautiful, sprawling and crawling, howling and hungry, satiable and insatiable, curious and furious and joyous, upside-down and inside-out poems from the last fifty years lived in America and Europe. From California to Bucharest we find body explorations, the sweetness of life, and the ironies of society literati and dictatorship politics that will suckerpunch new readers and knock the brains out of old. This is the true eclectic flavor of the wild and woolly literary mind of Richard Collins."" -Dana Wilde, author of Songs of the Seasons ""The world-weary-witty-wise genius author, poet extraordinaire Richard Collins, one of the most erudite, entertaining writers of this tumultuous time and place, has once again compiled some of the most forthright, soul-bright poems ever composed in any era and properly placed upon the page."" -Joan Jobe Smith, author of Moonglow á Go-Go: New and Selected Poems ""If Aubrey Beardsley had practiced zazen, he might have stood at the perfect distance from his flaneur self and still charmed the young. As it is, Richard Collins does the job."" -Andrei Codrescu, author of How to Live Under Fascism: New Poems and Photographs ""Collins presents the people, places, misadventures, and lessons learned over fifty years of literary life as he meditates on a myriad of subjects-among them war, climate change, and the loss of chaos in a once-beloved city-in poems that are playful, witty, and often satirical."" -Johnny Cordova, author of The Broken Buddha ""Cartoons for the Chaos presents a half century of poems that reflect his dedication to and exploration of poetry as a vehicle for his observations on the cartoonery of our times and the chaos thus created. Well done!"" -Joel XJ Dailey, author of New Details Emerge ""Richard Collins's exquisite Cartoons for the Chaos is full of bold reflective verses, often tragicomic, with astute observations of the chaos of humanity around him as he navigates life's inner turmoils with art and literature as his steadfast anchors, with nods to Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd."" -Davidson Garrett, author of Arias of a Rhapsodic Spirit ""In this wildly imaginative collection, a speaker who has finally ""quit collecting wedding rings"" looks back on life with a neo-surrealist sensibility and an ironic sense of humor. Lurking amidst this sly romp through memory's wreckage, a half-dozen deadly serious political poems provide proof that the difficult genre can still be done well-indeed, masterfully."" -Julie Kane, author of Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems ""Behold the poetry of Richard Collins. It has tamed the bestial world and turned its blaring chaos into the stillness of perfect observation. Whether citing a pair of brakeman's gloves, a bubble of blood, or an overcoat of rot that will inevitably consume, his work catalogs the balance between beauty, nature and disorder."" -Robert L. Penick, author of The Art of Mercy

Author Information

Richard Collins taught at universities in the U.S., Wales, Romania, and Bulgaria, before retiring as Dean Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at California State University Bakersfield. He taught for a decade at LSU (where he was the first faculty advisor for New Delta Review) and a decade at Xavier University of Louisiana as RosaMary Endowed Professor of English (where he edited the Xavier Review). He has been a Fulbright researcher in London and a Fulbright senior lecturer in Romania, as well as a Leverhulme Fellow in Wales. His books include John Fante: A Literary Portrait (Guernica Editions, 2000), No Fear Zen (Hohm Press, 2015), In Search of the Hermaphrodite: A Memoir (Tough Poets Press, 2024), and Stone Nest: Poems (Shanti Arts, 2025). Since 2016 he has been abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple and now resides in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he directs Stone Nest Zen Dojo.

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