Selected poems by Mike Lala.  Available mid December

Mike Lala's irresistible and sensuous poems of dancers, pilots, jazz, and lovers are as seductive as an evasive cat who, while moving oiled and effortlessly across the top of a couch, stares you down. There is both intellectual and spiritual control in this poet's invasive voice, his language equally bold and delicate, his timing impeccable. These poems will inhabit you long after you've put the book aside.

   Diane Wakoski

Michael Lala’s, Under the Westward Night, is a remarkable collection, at times stopping, time, with Basho strokes, at others, gesturing allusively, calling worlds back, through a montage of interior geographies, sunflower rooms, traveling regions of dark roads, under the influence, of planets, the dance of bodies and missed touch, accented always with a musician’s ear for sound and space, an artist’s eye for shadow and form and a poet’s willingness to sing and dance in the sweet becoming of loss, in the risk of giving ourselves away, to impulse, attraction, knowing the
music we hear, the bodies we hold, the longing we feel, will leave us, somehow, somehow, somehow, different, reshaped, transformed. This is a beautiful collection, read it and be reminded of what it is poetry does with us as we go about living as or among poets.

Gordon Henry

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Excerpt:

I begin this way to avoid misunderstandings. This is an article about how a writer-for-money produces manuscripts which sell.

I turn out 100,000 to 120,000 words a month for the "pulps"—magazines (so called because they are printed on "wood pulp" paper). These words—the pulp writer always talks of words—because he's paid on a wordage basis—are written as well as I am able to write them. I try constantly to improve the quality, the forcefulness and the keenness of character interpretation in my stories. I spend twice as much time on rewriting as on writing.

To me, these things and pride in my work are art enough . . .