Lewis Frederick Crystal

HERITAGE New Poems is the seventh book of poetry from bestselling author LEWIS FREDERICK CRYSTAL. All of the poems in this volume were written in the previous twelve months and many including the title poem, reflect upon the author's ancestors who fleeing Russia prior to World War I and the Bolshevick Revolution settled in Harlem, New York and then migrated to Brooklyn, where the author was born. Although his own influences grew out of the cultural revolution of the 1960's, it was literally impossible to escape the inestimable impact of his family and their valiant struggle to assimilate into the American landscape. Other poems here reference many of the author's personal tastes("Jimi" "A Revisionist History Lesson" and "Six Degrees of Delmore Schwartz"). Other poems center on personal struggles with issues of aging and the precise nature of the past and its relationship to the present and to the future ("Solitary Journey, " Summers Roll On")as well as Mr. Crystal's take on recent current events("And Darkness Covered The Face of The Deep", "Beautiful Little Kids").

WHEN SIX WAS NINE is the second part of the trilogy known worldwide as ADVENTURES IN THE VOID. It covers the crucial years when the world was turned upside down and on its end by cataclysmic changes in politics, the arts, and society in general. Eager to embrace the new freedoms awaiting his generation, Lucien Goldman rushes headfirst into the tumbling tides as described by The Chambers Brothers in their mini epic "Time Has Come Today". Duly his soul becomes "psychedelicized" Now if only he can get back home to his bedroom where the walls are covered by the icons of his generation: The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, etc. and explain everything to his anxious parents.