Beggar's Songbook

This is a collection that calls for ceremony. Id like to gather my beloved band of misfits go out in search of a wrecked old building build a small fire gather around and read Beggars Songbook aloud together inside the crumbling walls. The poems in Beggars Songbook are elegies turnkeys reckonings with un-birth pipe bombs hexes correspondences with the poltergeists of memory and invitations: to claw open the petroleum-stained soil with our faulty human hands to find the seeds that might still grow. They are trembling meditations tributes to the doomed tender and howling offerings of forgiveness excavations of the bound body entreaties of personal and planetary liberation. They are confessions that vibrate with pounding fists of an ego that will not be permitted to enter. They are chronicles of wreckage. They are possibilities that ascend only from such wreckage. Like the Coyote in his poem Sights Unseen Nathanael William Stoltes poems shape-change and [Tell] the truth with a diamond tongue / Sharp and precise. In other words amidst those of us who confuse self-loathing for humility Stolte has written a book of subterranean prayers that blaze with gasoline-soaked candor. Though unholy stenches may rise from our throats Beggars Songbook shakes and growls and whimpers us awake humbles us to name what is unnamed within ourselves and implores us to recognize the miracle of our own breath.-Rebecca Nison (poet writer educator)You dont know what to expect sometimes... This tall earnest guy among drunken Buffalo (NY)...i think we hung out first cuz he knew a good diner... one day he hands me a book and says my first chapbook! Tell me what you think sometime!Hmmm... Its a risk. I like Nathanael. We DO share a taste for writers... I pick a title... Hmm...Flip thru...scan...hmmm...ok!Greek mythology pagans in the moonlighttalk like film noir romance.Copper haired women and ghosts who speak only in dreams.Blood and gunmetal colored skies.A pipe with a medicine man behind the funeral home.The light of ancient gods cast upon the endless snow of childhood and forever broken cars.Yes buddy theres reasons...More than Id thought.It makes sense you knew a good all night diner.-Vic Ruggiero (singer/songwriter The Slackers)