"Howie Good's newest collection, Tomorrowland, offers the essential element of prose poetry: tight, moving language, and amazing imagery. From a firing squad who listens to the ball game on the radio to the heart's museum of stained glass and a wooden boardwalk, Good gives entire scenes in a matter of a few words. They are scenes of both starkness and beauty, or - to quote the poet, himself - "the birdsong, as sometimes happens, full of primitive grief."

With both the mastery of storytelling and the dance of poetry, Tomorrowland is a writer's envy and a reader's delight."

Susan Culver

"A fascinating series of vignettes, flashes, stories, each one incredibly focused, incredibly powerful, and surprising to the point of being scary."

Krishan Coupland

HOWIE GOOD

TOMORROWLAND

FLASH FICTION

24 PGS.

12 - 1 - 2008

$4.00

excerpt from TOMORROWLAND:


THE PARABLE OF SUNLIGHT

It’s a rare sunny day, but the streets are strangely empty, as if arrests are about to be made, or already have been. Head down, heart revving, I start across the square. The fountain is dry, stained with dead leaves. An old man, with the drab, diligent face of a lifelong student of numbers, scatters bread crumbs for the pigeons. I pretend not to notice – it’s safer – and in seconds, reach the far side, where bodies in the early stages of decay hang like gray rags from the trees. I glance back at the old man. He’s watching me, and I wonder why and whether tomorrow is supposed to be just as nice as today.