Meisel Celebrates and
Laments Detroit in Beautiful Rust
Bottom Dog Press has announced the release of Ken Meisel’s Beautiful Rust: Poems in its Working Lives Series. Ken Meisel is a poet and a psychotherapist born on the west side of Detroit and educated in the Detroit Public Schools.

The author states, “To write Beautiful Rust I went back into the city. Those of us who live here spend our lives in the elegant shadows of all the past glories—all of the triumphs such as Motown and the world renowned Auto Industry—while at the same time, we live in the ... great wound and defeat of the city... For those of us who live here, the wound and the triumph have become inseparable.”

The author adds, “I ate and talked with store front preachers, stampeded old abandoned factories, and I wandered into the old forgotten and neglected clubs that at one time hosted musical luminaries such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, John Lee Hooker, Jackie Wilson, and all the varied and famous Motown acts of the 1960’s. I was startled and amazed at how many people wanted their stories witnessed. I walked the Dequindre Cut to hang out with graffiti artists and watched how they were becoming the subculture artists of the city. In essence, I wanted to learn firsthand what the city, as a subject—as an energetic being—was telling me about itself.”
Poet Russell Thorbum comments, “Ken Meisel’s got the beat in his hit parade of Motown poems.  I love his long lines and smoky fires, the effect gravity has on the living and the dead. His Purgatorio includes Marvin Gaye, an echo of better times painted onto a billboard overlooking the freeway and Dubois Street….He is our modern Virgil talking us through the Rinaldo Arms Manor.  Read him and be saved.”

Beautiful Rust is 96 pages and includes a cover image from Detroit photographer Keith Emmerich. It sells for $15.00 and may be ordered from on-line bookstores or from the publisher at http://smithdocs.net. Profits from the book go to Inside Out Literary Arts Project, in Detroit. Bottom Dog Press, Inc., 419-433-3573/Lsmithdog@smithdocs.net