Lotus Buffet - Paperback

by Rupert Fike (Author)

Like Jack Kerouac, Rupert Fike is mad to talk. A Rupert Fike poem isn't small talk though. Fike wants to be saved, wants to live. One of my favorites in this volume is "Toast." "In the name of all that's toast it must go," he writes, as he struggles to put the diode-eye out of a machine that, Cyclops-like, watches over our lives. Armed with hammer and nail, Fike is Everyman-Ulysses out for justice. But Fike also knows his limits. In the lovely last poem of this volume, the poet accepts a bittersweet truth he cannot change. The soul must seek another outlet as children outgrow the past. Like Fike-and Kerouac, too-we may love the beauty of "words, words, words stretched out, limitless," though, in the end, poetry of this caliber leads us to understand when and why they must leave off, as well. -Stephen Bluestone

Author Biography

Rupert Fike's work has been published in Rosebud, The Georgetown Review, storySouth, Borderlands, Texas Review of Poetry, The Cumberland Review, The Cortland Review, Natural Bridge (University of Missouri at St Louis), Atlanta Review, Snake Nation Review, Backwards City Review, FutureCycle, Dark Sky Magazine, A Celebration of Southern Poets (Kennesaw University Press) and others. He has been nominated for a Pushcart prize in poetry (Java Monkey Speaks) and short fiction (Rosebud). A poem of his is inscribed in a downtown Atlanta plaza, and he has had several one act plays produced by the Alliance Theatre Interns for Theatre Emory. His non-fiction book, Voices from the Farm, edited accounts of life on this country's largest spiritual community, The Farm, is now available in paperback. Lotus Buffet, his first poetry collection, was a finalist in the Brick Road Poetry Contest 2010. Rupert Fike reads his poems and conducts workshops at high schools and middle schools in the Atlanta area. He lives with his wife, Kathy, in Clarkston, Georgia not far from their daughters and grandchildren. Kathy and Rupert spent eight years on The Farm, a spiritual community in middle Tennessee which they helped found in 1971 after several years in the bay area. He is working on a book of poems based on The Farm experience.