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    One of Us Is Real
    One of Us Is Real
    One of Us Is Real
    Ebook69 pages48 minutes

    One of Us Is Real

    By Scot Ehrhardt

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    One of Us Is Real is a book of mythic poems, filled with larger-than-life characters who inhabit the long empty houses and music-filled cities of memory. In poet Scot Ehrhardt’s capable hands, the masks, stories, and half-truths we know about the past are pulled aside, word by word, to reveal fallible people made of blood and bone.

    Ehrhardt’s collection recreates figures who loom large in memory: a boy-hero whose indestructible body seems to be made of limestone, a teacher of Chinese painting who helps the poet to “forget/ to doubt/ knowing only/ the saturated point,” stoic parents, and elusive lovers. In this convergence of past and present, it is the remembered details that convey emotion.

    Ehrhardt understands that language carries myth-making in its DNA. Several poems, “Stone, Taste, and Apples,” “Returning to the Heart,” and “Heritage Day” look at how we absorb ideas through the same language that can be a barrier to understanding. This theme is fully realized in the love poem, “What Is Said When Nothing Is Said,” which argues “the absence of sound is also language: another form of cursive in the bending/ arms of sunlight.”

    The poet is an inventive portraitist with a deep understanding of how people and places are drawn and redrawn in memory, the truth shifting with each retelling like “a silver photograph of the sky, inverse,/ creased endlessly by the wind.”

    By Laura Shovan
    Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence
    Poetry Editor, Little Patuxent Review

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScot Ehrhardt
    Release dateJan 9, 2016
    ISBN9781311735744
    One of Us Is Real
    Author

    Scot Ehrhardt

    Scot Ehrhardt teaches and writes. He does other things, too, like architectural salvage and stone sculpting, but you probably aren’t interested in that. He has published work in Little Patuxent Review, Infinity’s Kitchen, Tidal Basin Review, Lines + Stars, and New Verse News.

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      Book preview

      One of Us Is Real - Scot Ehrhardt

      One of Us Is Real

      Poems by Scot Ehrhardt

      Published by Scot Ehrhardt

      Distributed by Smashwords

      Copyright 2015 Scot Ehrhardt

      Cover art by Aydin Hamami: www.aydinhamami.com

      Smashwords Edition License Note: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to others. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

      This book is dedicated to my dragonfly, with love.

      Acknowledgements

      You Have No Memory of Matthew Yung – published in Little Patuxent Review

      Returning to the Heart – published in Little Patuxent Review, reprinted in The Muse

      Stone, Taste, and Apples – published in Tidal Basin Review

      What Is Said When Nothing Is Said – published in Little Patuxent Review, reprinted in The Muse

      Dialogic – published in Infinity’s Kitchen

      Kazaan –

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