The Madness of Vultures

"The poems that make up the volume called The Madness of Vultures represent my young life in art. Of the hundreds I wrote in my twenties, only these sixteen survive as a really accurate testament to the way I was forever contemplating-with great anxiety and some optimism-the nervous and often irresolvable tension between the nightmare and the natural, between the carefully-trained lens of science and the unpredictability of experience, between nihilistic dread and the joy of discovering that one is alive. My fondest hope is that in some smoky midnight, in some far-off place, a circle of young poets will have found this modest volume and be moved to read it aloud to one another, as they begin to experience their own lives in art. And perhaps they will be reminded that, often, what looks like madness, may be nothing more than the way the world simply is, the only way it can be. Vultures aren't actually mad, after all. They are just hungry." Joel A Rogers