Check this out! Here is the link to my first book,
*Bird's Horn & Other Poems*, which you can learn more about at Amazon.com. (Just click on the book image to the left.)
Book summary:
Bird’s Horn & Other Poems depicts places as diverse as Dinsmoor’s sculpture garden in Lucas, Kansas, and Jardine’s jazz club in Kansas City. As the title suggests, many of the poems are about jazz and jazz musicians, ranging from advice given by an aging drummer to an upstart in “Artt Frank’s Speedbag” to a conversation about Charlie Parker’s plastic saxophone in “Bird’s Horn.” Rabas oscillates between rural and urban landscapes, revealing a sense of Midwestern history and legacy in these poems. There are also poems of travel, such as “Loaning Books,” which follows the collection’s narrator across Europe, his books in tow. Beyond themes of regionalism, Rabas also explores the regions of the heart. The collection’s narrator moves from marriage to divorce to new love and family. Many of the collection’s final poems center thematically around lessons from fatherhood. For instance, in “Catch,” the narrator teaches himself to the throw a ball so that even his toddler son can catch it.
