David J. Lovato

You're navigating the wilderness we call a society. Your family or your church turned their back on you. Or your car broke down. Or your guitar did. Everyone witnesses storms, everyone splits. Time flies by. Seasons grow and change, and then they die. Along a long-forgotten highway, tires drift. You haven't seen your partner because they're picking up extra shifts. You dream about another world because this one doesn't fit. When it's your turn, will you sigh or cry or shout into the sky: This can't be all there is. 27 poems, 27 narrators. It's a big world, and this is what they saw in it. What will you see?

Each of the 16 poems in Permanent Ink on Temporary Pages stands alone, but also serves as a piece of a larger narrative. From the death of poetry itself in "At Rest in the Sea" to the lifetime-spanning "The Back of the Room", the stream-of-consciousness piece "Alone" to the song-turned-poem "Sunday Calls for Cloudy Skies", and the thematically-related interludes "Letters", "Pages", and "Poetries", Permanent Ink on Temporary Pages tells the story of a narrator struggling to find his place in the world, drifting between tangential universes, and replacing the people around him with fictional characters, all the while writing letters he doesn't send, poetry scattered to the wind, and pages full of everything he can't bear the thought of losing.