The Homesick Mortician by Peter Mladinic

“Pete Mladinic’s new book, The Homesick Mortician, is a poetic buffet of the ordinary and extraordinary, the real and surreal, the monstrous and marvelous. Past and present weave seamless stories that will stay with you long after you put this book down.”

—Nolcha Fox, author of Cancer Isn’t Just a Constellation. Editor for Garden of Neuro. Nominee for 2023 Best of the Net and 2024 Best of the Net Anthology.

“The poems in Peter Mladinic’s The Homesick Mortician restlessly probe. Beneath each piece, there’s the “why” that perplexes the poet. In “How Amazing,” Mladinic, an animal rights advocate, asks why we can’t see the value of animals. And in his most harrowing poem “Light and Dark,” he shows us how power can be both a gift and a crime. Even in Mladinic’s persona poems, written in the voices of people who have committed heinous acts, one finds deep compassion. This is the book to read when you need a partner in outrage, and when your heart needs healing.”

—Tina Barry, author of Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower.

:There’s a fierce sense of history in Peter Mladinic’s The Homesick Mortician, some of it real, some imagined. Bad things happen in moving cars. Lost souls abound, with killers and victims, and many others barely surviving their trials on Earth. There are those wounded in the flesh and others wounded in the spirit. Blame no one? Hardly. Some poems are quiet character studies, some are cautionary narratives, with wonders taken from headlines, old and new. There, too, are moments of rare grace, good memories of friends gone too soon. Mladinic gives us a world where “a man with a wooden leg/ and a boy in a white shirt/ talk weather/ and look like an argument.” The strange and the mundane combine into sharp mystery. This is exquisite poetry and worthy of your time.”

—Jeff Weddle, author of Driving the Lost Highway and winner of the Eudora Welty Prize.

Peter Mladinic lives in Hobbs, New Mexico. He was born and raised in New Jersey and has lived in the Midwest and in the South. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served for four years. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1985, and taught English for thirty years at New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs. He has edited two books: Love, Death, and the Plains; and Ethnic Lea: Southeast New Mexico Stories, which are available from the Lea County Museum Press, as are three volumes of poetry: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington. His most recent book, Knives on a Table was published by Better Than Starbucks Publications in 2021. He is a past board member of the Lea County Museum and a former president of the Lea County Humane Society. An animal advocate, he supports numerous animal rescue groups. Two of his main concerns are to bring an end to the euthanizing of animals in shelters and to help get animals in shelters adopted into caring homes.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 96 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-471-0

$18

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