FOMITE

Mason Drukman’s collection—augmented by the artistry of Lisa Esherick—offers a fresh poetic voice that speaks with intelligence, clarity, humor and heart. His subject matter is life itself: culture, politics, family, death, grief, love and the Red Sox. Welcome to his special kind of poetry.

 

About the Author

Born in Boston in 1932, Mason Drukman had a varied career as factory worker, short-order cook, broadcaster (Armed Forces Radio Service), political scientist (Reed College; University of California, Berkeley), author (Community and Purpose in America : McGraw-Hill; Wayne Morse, A Political Biography : OHS Press), editor (The Oregon Times), administrator (The Learning Community, Portland, Oregon ; Consumers Institute, Wellington, New Zealand; Survivors International, San Francisco), and freelance writer: his pieces have appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers and journals. This is his first book of poetry.

 

About the Artist

Born in San Francisco in 1941 to architect parents, Lisa Esherick studied at the San Francisco Art Institute under Diebenkon, Weeks, Neri, Lobdell and Jefferson. She taught classes at City College of San Francisco from 1976 to 2006, during which time she received an M.F.A. in painting from San Francisco State University. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Germany, and is held in numerous private and corporate collections. After two decades of making paintings inspired by travels and dealing with people in public places, from train stations and airports to casinos and spas, she returned to an old love— the cityscape and freeways of San Francisco for her subject. Lately she has been dividing her studio time between painting and making short, stop motion animated films. Lisa maintains her studio in Berkeley. 

 

Praise

“Mason Drukman's poems lodge in the space between happiness and impending chaos or catastrophe, marking with exquisite care what he calls "signposts on the pathway to failure." But there's nothing grim or lugubrious about these efforts. We see large-hearted, sometimes ironic, sometimes tender treatments of even loss and bereavement: a family dog who runs away, escaping some underspecified "detonation" in the house, is his serio-comic emblem for deprivation, betrayal, and diminishment. Drukman is a master of verbal dexterity in pointing up the world's gaucheries. His reflections often turn back to an earlier era--childhood, America in the fifties and sixties—but his poetry is always grounded in the—present. I'm a fan of his wonderful memory poems: they are redemptive even as they produce a stab in the heart, all over again.” 

—Roger J. Porter, author of Bureau of Missing Persons (Cornell), and with Sandra Gilbert, co-editor of Eating Words (Norton).