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    COLLATERAL DAMAGE REPORT and other works
    COLLATERAL DAMAGE REPORT and other works
    COLLATERAL DAMAGE REPORT and other works
    Ebook53 pages22 minutes

    COLLATERAL DAMAGE REPORT and other works

    By Michael Pollick

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    About this ebook

    Collateral Damage Report and other works contains poetry and microfiction author Michael Pollick has published in various magazines and journals over the past 30 years. PIeces in this collection have previously appeared in The Iconoclast, Midwest Poetry Review, HART- A Tome For The Arts, MOSAIC, Miller's Pond and the political poetry anthology Will Work For Peace, among others.

    This collection explores a number of different themes, from childhood to the struggles of growing older. Some poems focus on the collateral damage caused by warfare, while others explore love in all of its aspects. 

    One of Pollick's literary influences is the late Raymond Carver, and several pieces use the same poetry/ultra short fiction technique. Is a piece like Brother Judd or Makebelieve Ballroom a poem or a microshort story? You decide.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Pollick
    Release dateJun 27, 2014
    ISBN9781501428944
    COLLATERAL DAMAGE REPORT and other works
    Author

    Michael Pollick

    I was born in Akron, Ohio in 1964, but now call the Deep South home. My interest in creative writing started at a very early age, after several teachers entered my class assignments into regional and national writing competitions. I had my first professional publication credit at age 16. I mostly write poetry and microshort fiction, but have also started writing humor essays. Some of these essays were scheduled to appear on the labels of gourmet coffee cans from Portland, Oregon. Others appear in my print titles "Growing Up Bulldog: The Stowbilly Chronicles" and "All That To Say This".My work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and journals over the years, including The Iconoclast, Miller's Pond, Midwest Poetry Review, Whatever Remembers Us and Will Work For Peace (new political poems). I have also created a series of visualized poems based on the collection available here at Smashwords. They can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/channels/michaelpollick or at my YouTube channel.Here's my first professional review:"By John Davis For The Decatur Daily | 0 commentsALL THAT TO SAY THIS.By Michael Pollick.CreateSpace, $5.75, paperback.I found this collection of essays, vignettes and poetry captivating. Indeed, the essays and poetry are each uniquely valuable, for they reveal entirely different aspects of this gifted writer. I found this collection worthwhile, and here’s why.Michael Pollick, born and raised in Ohio, and now a Decatur resident, offers a treasure trove of humor. Most intriguing, however, we learn that he is not only genuinely funny, as his essays on school life (and coffee!) reveal, but he is also a mature, intense, thoughtful poet.You can tell when someone is funny when he can make you laugh, when reading by yourself, about places and people you never met. Pollick is a humorist in the vein of Mark Twain.He takes relatively benign events, such as his home town’s Fourth of July parade, his grade school’s bizarre teachers and his high school’s social engineering and make them so funny you want to tell someone. I suppose what I found most appealing was his Jay Leno style of using exaggerated “psycho babble” to explain school days manipulations by psychological experimentation.Pollick does as well as Bill Cosby, whose spelling class, scary kid stories, and Fat Albert reminiscences remain among our funniest memories. You’ll have to read the book to enjoy the tales of the little Spock-throttled third grade prisoners marching to the demands of their Skinner box school days.What’s more, you’ll find the coffee essays equally entertaining. Not only coffee, though, but rambling thoughts on Saturday morning cartoons, mattresses and broken thermos bottles will keep you reading one short vignette after another. You’ll find you don’t want the list to end. And might I add his list of defined coffee terms is an absolute hoot!And then you get to the poetry. You find a different man writing here. Here we find a sensitive, indeed, poignant poet. We read of nostalgia and of the sense of loss. I find links to the earlier humor in an unusual way. A writer who can draw us back to common experiences which make us laugh, can also do as well to make us cry. I read “Bringing the Wendy’s” and knew this poem would live long after we are all gone.Pollick’s books are available on Amazon.com and Createspace.com."

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      Book preview

      COLLATERAL DAMAGE REPORT and other works - Michael Pollick

      Abandoning Red Hill

      'Now it is a vineyard, like so many others;/But when you taste its wine, you drink the blood of your brothers.'  From Red Hill, a French folk song.

      I let someone else do the driving for a little while-

      I watched the lines blur behind us, each racing after the next,

      towards some vanishing point just beyond the Stuckey's sign;

      I am abandoning Red Hill again.

      I screamed to get in there many years ago,

      trapped between Heaven and a birthing table,

      taking in just so much air to mark some territory.

      No, my feet don't fit my legs too well,

      if lamp-burnt movies don't lie.

      I spent more time falling in those badly-lit days;

      I was learning to stand like a man, like a Midwest farmer man-

      until push came to shove, and I retired my number.

      I am abandoning Red Hill again, and the weight of it scares me-

      I will no longer have forts to defend from night-time attack,

      and defenseless clay soldiers will have to fend for themselves.

      (I will be back for you, I promise.)

      Now the asphalt-hard truth is staring holes right through me-

      Red Hill will never leave me, will never turn me away;

      Red Hill will always be mine for the asking;

      (I could never ask for more from any other memory.)

      Pull over, I'm ready to drive now.

      ATTICUS RESTS

      We should all sweat long

      enough to meet the man

      who beat the law of averages.

      This man is not the sum of his words,

      but the total of his actions.

      The books grow colder, the papers scatter,

      the disciples pray elsewhere;

      but the teacher (oh! the teacher)

      is still with us.

      The house seems smaller, the children older,

      the grass grows higher;

      but the father (oh! the father)

      is still with us.

      We seek your country simple

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