BF.jpg "Addicts & Basements (Robert Vaughan)")
Addicts & Basements is a repeatedly complex look at the world in which we live through the lens of painfully human characters, depicted with unnerving authenticity and irreverent compassion. At times hilarious, and other times dark, these prose poems contain enough to crack your heart wide open.
The Book has been published via Civil Coping Mechanisms and is available as Paperback - 142 pages - released in February 2014.
About the Book
The book is in three sections, as depicted in the title: Addicts are explored and exposed in the first third, in various forms such as a man who is too attached to his grandfather's femur bone, or a woman who whose need to mythologize her family histories are exposed in "Four Myths."
The Ampersand section (&) contains wind-ranging poems, like "On the Wings of a Dove," devoted to Matthew Shepard, or "Sinkholes," in which a husband and wife attempt to navigate the landscape around them sinking.
The third section explores Basements in all of their mysterious, dank glory: whether it's the strangeness of a threesome in "The Hazards of Moving in With a Couple," or what we lose in "The Lost and Erasable Parts of Us."
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Addicts & Basements is Vaughan's first full length collection, from a unique and innovative independent press. The voice is current, unique and substantially creative. The pathos in the writing gives you the idea that Vaughan has lived a full, and meaningful life. Also the exploration of pushing the boundaries of prose and poetry, re-defining the lines that establish both genres is explored in Addicts & Basements as well.
Reviews (Excerpts)
- "Addicts and Basements, a marvelous full length collection of poems as flash fiction or flash fiction as poems is a batch of psychically sharp writing that is at once awash in shadow, beguiling, unusual, mysterious and revelatory. Vaughan unspools verse in mass quantity, stacking each passage on a previous gemlike passage, all the while leading the reader farther away from familiar touchstones and deeper into the infinite reward of the strange, out of the ordinary, even at times super natural. Hypnotic. Maze-like. Bio-luminescent. Utterly crushing. Transformative." - Bud Smith
- "Robert Vaughan's Addicts & Basements is a wonderful collection of the writers flash fiction. I find his works to be deep and thought provoking. It's almost as if this writer can see into my and the collective soul." - Andrea Falkenstein
- "Robert Vaughan explores addictions and the dark crannies of basements in his collection, Addicts & Basements, which assembles a variety of his works from flash fiction to poetry. [...] Vaughan’s words act as amphetamines and depressants, a lyrical brand of verbal inhalants that capture moments, sometimes brief, sometimes interminably addictive." - Peter Tieryas (Amazon)
- "[...]this flash fiction and poetry collection packs a unique punch, not unlike the rush from needle to vein. From cryptic marvels of the brain to the sometimes uneasy wonders of spaces underground, Addicts & Basements cuts a jagged path, page by page, that gets right down to most rawly human parts of us all." - Molly (Amazon)
About the Author
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| Author Robert Vaughan |
He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His fiction “10,000 Dollar Pyramid” was a finalist in the Micro-Fiction Awards 2012. Also, “Ten Notes to the Guy Studying Jujitsu” was a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award 2013.
He is senior flash fiction editor at JMWW and Lost in Thought magazines. His chapbooks are Microtones (Cervena Barva) and Diptychs + Triptychs + Lipsticks + Dipshits (Deadly Chaps). His first full- length book is Addicts and Basements (Civil Coping Mechanisms).
Links to the Author and the Book
Connect via the Author's Website
Connect via Twitter: @rgvaughan
Link to the Paperback Addicts & Basements on Amazon - UK
Link to the Paperback Addicts & Basements on Amazon - US
