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Author, James (Jim) RalstonInspired by Thoreau's Walden, especially by the second chapter, ""Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,"" I live in the country on three and a half acres between Rocky Gap and Evitts Creeks, eight miles outside of Cumberland, Maryland.Across Rocky Gap Creek is the rarely used, but nicely kept up Union Grove Campgrounds, and equally rarely used outdoor pavilion/church, as if they're extensions of both my front yard and spiritual life. Many mornings, I sit in the pavilion alone, meditating, contemplating, writing in my journal. Above the sanctuary, a sign reads, ""YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN,"" and Thoreau and I couldn't agree more. We don't see it as an order from above, rather as something necessary.Three houses up the creek from my small home is a one-room schoolhouse, like the one in Michigan where my Grandma Nora used to teach. I never walk by it without remembering her and Aunt Emma, who generously shared their small house with me in 1961, so I could afford my first year of Alma College, a Christian college where I lost my little boy faith, I now know, in retrospect, to give myself room for something bigger, thanks Grandma, Aunt Emma, and Alma. What I have lived for is harder to condense, but can be found in my publications, which include The Choice of Emptiness, a collection of essays and reflections that also reads as a novel; numerous essays and poems published in The Sun: a Magazine of Ideas over a span 35 years; and fifteen years of columns published between 1990 and 2005 in the Charleston Gazette, and in this book of poems, and an earlier one, Lyrics for a Low Noon, both published by Blue Light Press out of San Francisco. Along the way, I also directed many plays in several theatres, but primarily in the Apollo Theater in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Several of the plays I wrote myself, including ""Many Mansions,"" ""The Lone Star League,"" and ""Divine Madness.""

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Praise for Dangerous Intimacies These are the almost hopeful poems of a man who, in another time, might have been satisfied to stay on the farm of his childhood. But restlessness drives him to wander geographically and philosophically and to turn his poems into explorations of everything from heaven to football, from lessons in literature to traffic signs.What does it mean to be a man? Ralston asks. Can there ever be intimacy without danger? Grit and hard-earned wisdom work here, as do heroes, though not the kind you might be looking for.Ralston's brilliance in this work is to blend the roughhewn and musical while keeping his sights already on a heart that wants to be both protected and revealed. What a rich and rewarding collection.- BARB HURD, author of Epilogues In the poem ""Lessons,"" Jim Ralston writes of Chekov's Lt. Ryabovitch being left alone in a dark room to contemplate ""who he can't be and who he has to be instead."" These poems express that narrative arc, the tensions between identities we invent for ourselves and the reality of what is. As a child and as a young man, Ralston was keenly aware of all that was left unsaid. In these poems he turns over those stones and takes out the artifacts of the unspoken ground of his life. He doesn't resist the close examination now. The older we are, sometimes the more we hide. But Jim Ralston goes there, to the gritty heart of it all, the uncertainties, the unrealized longings. I'm grateful for this book.- PATRICIA HENLEY, author of Hummingbird House and In the River SweetIn these poems Ralston writes about moments that have persisted - for years and years, a lifetime. He doesn't resist the tragic, the divine, the sublime. He doesn't resist himself. ""I like knowing the world up close/ the pleasure, the pain, the losses, the gains/ the whole mess of it."" Just when we think the poems are revealing the writer, they reveal us to ourselves.- BRYON MacWILLIAMS, author of With Light Steam

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