Imbued with the steady, often meditative movement of a train, Walter Ruhlmann's poems in Crossing Puddles, which he refers to as "geographical maps of the self," are both tender and hard, hopeless and hope-giving. A thread of longing connects one poem to the next like the string of a lover's spit. Or semen. The landscapes he writes about are Bath, Manchester, the Indian Ocean. The bodies of various men. In this collection, longing is part of a triplet, and the triplet's siblings are wonder and terror. But the hidden beauty of the collection lies in the breathtaking image poems representative of the meticulously dissected mind of the author, who hails from Normandy, France.

77 pages.

Cover art by Kevin Dooley.

Available for immediate download.

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Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing. Walter is the author of several poetry collections, chapbooks and e-books in French and English, and has published poetry, fiction and non-fiction in various printed and electronic publications worldwide. Nominated for Pushcart Prize once, his latest collections are Maore published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast, UK, 2013 and Carmine Carnival published by Lazarus Media, USA, 2013. He blogs at: http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr/