Adelaide Literary Magazine No.23

SHE IS A WOMAN

by James Evan Gates

Impermanence
Stop what you are doing and take a nap.
Your bed is calling. The rain is falling.
Our long and arduous expedition has come to an end.
Be at peace with it. We shared a piece of it.
Let your thoughts descend like an anvil through a cloud,
racing to the ground, never to be found.
You are free from the spinning material world,
all the flickering lights, all the blustering heights.
The end of nothing is the beginning of everything.
It is a reason to kneel, not a broken wheel.
Do not wave goodbye to someone you have never met.
Wave bonjour instead. Language is in your head.
Take your enemy’s hand and give yourself a pat on the back
before it is too late. We will not commiserate.
I love you. I love you. I love you, and thank you.

She Is a Woman About the Author:

She is a woman. James Evan Gates is an educator, musician,
She is everything I will never be. philosopher, poet and visual artist from Alexan-
She is a woman, dria Louisiana. He received a Bachelor of Fine
a figment of reverie. Arts and a Master of Arts in Teaching from Lou-
isiana Tech University in 2008 and 2010. Evan
She has bruises on her long white legs teaches studio art at the Avoyelles Public Char-
and an overabundance of little eggs. ter School in Mansura Louisiana. He lives in
She is always late for an affair, Mansura with his wife Morgana, son Oliver and
and I cannot help but stare. daughter Naomi. Evan enjoys Christian theolo-
gy as articulated by Søren Kierkegaard, the
She is a woman. poetry of T. S. Eliot, the novels of Hermann
She is everything I will never be. Hesse, the paintings of Gil Elvgren, the photog-
She is a woman, raphy of Robert Mapplethorpe, the comedy of
a fountain of equity. Conan O’Brien, the music of Prince Rogers Nel-
son, the cultural criticisms of Camille Paglia,
With Southern grace she can charm the economic criticisms of Thomas Sowell, the
every hairy muscled arm logotherapy of Viktor Frankl and the applica-
that seeks her warm embrace tion of Jungian archetypes by Jordan Peterson.
and a tender glance from her tender face.

She is a woman.
She is everything I will never be.
She is a woman,
a victim of therapy.

What kind of creature is this
that my mind cannot dismiss?
What ancient magic is brewing
when ancient love is renewing?

She is a woman.
She is everything I will never be.
She is a woman,
a speaker of heresy.

CEILING FAN

by Kyle Doty

Another Poem About Tragedy
I told you your sins were absolved.
I did not tell you that I don’t have the authority.
So I’m a liar.
The truth is without you there wouldn’t be a tragedy. If my life were a film, you’d be the antago-
nist with a sinister smile, always a trick up your sleeve; it’s because in the film you’d have already
emptied the contents of the vault into your bag and for the duration of the story they’d be picking
through clues to find you.
But once they find you, film’s over. It’s because there’s nothing left to see. Who wants to watch a
movie with no bad guy? No one goes to see a film where nothing happens.
Like I said, you bring the tragedy.
All I do is play priest after the bad deed is done and deliver you the news that it was all a fraud.

Ceiling Fan Five Month Triptych

Your long vulnerable body, asleep, I. Not yet Independence Day
presents itself like someone
timid for affection— The day before July fourth.
me feeling like a voyeur, The sun envelops the body in
a purveyor of skin. its iron grip—
twenty minutes at the playground
I’ve witnessed the terror of today was all even the children could bear.
you sleeping alone, your back
to your lover—your exotic All the stores are packed with
dreams the only sensuous touch. holiday shoppers and those who
just let out of church—it was easy
And when you’re not alone, to spot the church-goers:
in a tangle of arms and feet, the children are bundles of energy,
your mouth hole open exposing the mothers’ dresses are clean and pressed,
the blackness of your throat, fathers happy, like the children,
from which escapes the short to be up and moving, ready to eat.

sounds of ecstasy—I, a prophet, We visited our friend’s baby.
can see you’re still alone— She slept the whole time.
First in her mother’s lap
trapped in some locked-away and then in her father’s arms.
suffering.

II. Moved in III. Academic Year

The moving truck was parked Someone once told
and reparked three times me work is hard by design.
in the driveway— Adam made it so
in the garden with
a space larger than our front yard that apple and his
at the old house. The house that lady friend.
maybe still expects us to return
Others tell me Christ
one day and press our ears to the Eternal Immanuel
her side to hear her secrets— redeemed it all down
Her anxiety because the man to the single last tittle
of humanity.
who enters her each evening
is still a stranger even though
it's been three months.

By near October there are
still boxes in the corners
of rooms and the kitchen

we began remodeling
is still in shambles.

The old house sighs so
deeply I can hear her from
here.

It's the sound of children's
feet slapping against her
floorboards she misses most.

Que Natus Es
With the first soft flurries came the long fingers of pain.
By the time the world was white, it was time to go. The roads were cordoned off in places. So early
in the morning, most people were home, still in bed, under thick comforters, electric blankets; men
asleep, nude, pressing themselves against their lovers.
The deserted streets under the cold glow of the moon must have been something to see: radiant
glory, trees illuminated by light and ice the way a cobweb reflects the morning sun.
I came screaming into the sterile light.
I had not mastered anything. I had not tasted the acidity of hate. I did not, because I could not, feel
the fire of love.
I was the only one. There was no one in my universe, yet.
For a while, under a heat lamp, a small cotton hat atop my head the shape of a cone because I was
plunged from darkness, I was still.
Then I was taken to my mother.

About the Author:

Kyle Doty lives in Florida where he works as a
virtual teacher. He has had two collections of
poetry published by Apprentice House Press.
Hush, Don't Tell Nobody was released in 2015
and Winter Lightning in 2016. His books are
available on Amazon and online at Barnes and
Noble. He is at work on his next collection of
poetry.

Selections from

CALL ME ISHMAEL’S
APRENTICE

by Eileen Flaxman

Certainty A ship in the harbor
is thy savior. a ship not at sea
In this storm–tossed, is no ship at all
tumultuous world,
with death to our left strange and solitary.
and our right, A ship with no captain
we look to Thee though in sunlight it gleams
Who never wavers
Whose word is law and is not yet alive
Whose punishment is swift. only mere joints and beams.
I am adrift when in doubt
but afloat in Thy But when sails unfurl
and Ahab walks the deck
Certainty. and the salt spray stings

Chapter 9 -- The Sermon the back of my neck
Then the Pequod reigns
and comes into its own,
with the ocean its kingdom
and the waves its throne.

Chapter 16 -- The Ship

A sailor
is anchored
to his ship

His ship
to the ocean
The ocean
to the planet
The planet
which feels
steady and solid

as granite
floats and spins
held down by
He who planned it
and whose whims
test all who withstand it.

Chapter 121 -- Midnight.—The Forecastle Bulwarks

Man hunts whale
whale does not hunt man -
and yet could, there being
many more whales than ships,
a whale outweighing a man and in
his element out in the vast ocean, and
man needing to be propped up
in flimsy buckets that crack
and break like teacups when the
mighty forces of weather and
water work against them.

And all the while, the
whale glides by or
slips below,

reemerging at his leisure
to find the sea smooth as glass.

Chapter 57 --Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood;
in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

About the Author:

As a performer, it was important for Eileen
Valentino to communicate thoughts and emo-
tions that mattered – merely amusing an audi-
ence wasn’t in her wheelhouse. This goal led
her to write her own songs and material and
the Philadelphia Inquirer to dub her a
‘Renaissance Women’ for her acting, singing
and writing talents. Ms. Flaxman regretfully left
behind her membership in A.S.C.A.P. when she
moved on from songwriting to poetry.
As a poet who has written a poem for every
chapter in Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK, Ei-
leen Valentino Flaxman has the same goal, for,
“… what moves us as humans becomes part of
us. Melville’s classic novel possesses lessons
and truths that resonate even today and offer
endless opportunities for writers to plumb
their depths.” (from her complete collection:
https://evflax.wixsite.com/ishmaelsapprentice)
Ms. Flaxman has also written a memoir-novel:
Pieces of Glass: Growing Up Catholic in the
Fifties, soon to be published.

FRACTIONS

by Anya Lofamia

bodies and becoming

who chose this face for me : is this mine?
there is some strangeness in being born
to a body of a twenty-six-year-old human being.
what happened to me? he thought. it was no dream :
ah, but Samsa’s was a different turn. reading glasses, crumpled
hysteric papers on the mattress. the feet becomes conscious
of the floor and recalls the color : wet. human shells and poetry.
inching towards the desk, the hand stretches for a pen and paper

my dearest H., my one,
but the comma draws its blade and cuts off the hand.
who chose this body is better off without me.
how about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this
nonsense? he thought. that was something he was unable to do
because –who will choose the dream for me? darkly,
the body will not sleep darkly.

fractions

but we can only see fractions, say you
to me, your eyelashes falling out
sexily. yes, i say, only fractions.
because that’s how you read everything
and it’s how i speak to you. in old sepia.
in an unrealized artifact. this is how we say
we love : we let everything agree with water.
rawly, you walk upon the black breast of earth
and deeply now I stare: what we do with so much?
we cracked open the word once, upon
a time so hunchbacked, only we could re-
member the scene. langkag, darling, must
mean hollowness more than absence. what do we
do with so much. remains. the word, serpent-
ing towards me from your eyes whispering:
when i feel like screaming, darling, i whisper.

Stick Drawings, for Kazuki

the city the spectator
my hand in the shell
of your hand I remember
my mother said I am
all over the place but
today I am still as I steal
the lines from your palms
to draw myself wings
which is you which is this
which is here: nothing
can be given or taken back
I remember you lost
your phone in the sea.
This line gives it back.
A crunch of an apple
somewhere, on the sidewalk,
a broken bottle of beer,
dislocation and words,
dislocation in words,
comma a traitor,
cutting us short,
a play for amateurs

About the Author:
Ma. Antonette Lofamia is a Filipino writer li-
ving in Japan. Published as Anya Lofamia, her
works appear in Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal
(Spring 2015 Issue and the 2015 printed antho-
logy), Plural Prose Journal, and Queen Mob’s
Tea House Misfic Doc. Her work also appears in
the recently published anthology, NARITO: Es-
says on Place.

ORANGES AND
LEMONS

by Aaron Fischer

Lines for Joey Ramone
(Jeffery Ross Hyman, 1951 – 2001)

When the last words of some conversation
get lost in a spatter of crackle and buzz, I can almost hear again
the band roaring through its set, the music palpable
as a windstorm, pushing the crowd back half a step,
cranking up the slam-dancers in the mosh pit,
as if the floor of CBGBs were a hot skillet,
while you prowl the cramped stage — leather jacket, skinny
jeans, black high-tops — dragging the mic stand
behind you like it’s attached to an IV,
or jump up and down, fist pumping,
hair falling over your face and shades,
a scrawny punk afflicted with St. Vitus Dance.
***

In the summer of my lost year,
under the signs of the roach and silverfish,

the Lower East Side collapsing on its own
into rubble and plaster dust,

the music was all we wanted, the drugs
were just something to do while waiting,

we told ourselves, like the great jazzmen, the dead
soldiers — sticky-sweet Robitussin empties —

piling up in the sink, the crimped tubes of glue
and paper bags littering the floor of the bedroom,

the Mexican heroin the club kids sold,
black tar, the scraps of tinfoil used to chase the dragon.

There was always another show. At the Continental
and Max’s, at Coney Island High on St. Marks,

at the Mudd Club and the Pyramid, where the bartenders
wore full drag and earplugs while the band

howled through its cover of “Palisades Park”
and you delivered your surreal catchphrases,

like “Gabba Gabba Hey,” which we loved
because it meant nothing, just as we loved you,

an acne-pocked kid from Queens with bad teeth,
our goofy virtuoso of chaos.

****

It took me three shots at rehab to get it right.
I moved to Jersey and worried for years

that I would run into someone I knew at the Chinese takeout
or laundromat. I bought each record

when it came out: The band getting louder, like a chop shop
dismembering Hondas and Toyotas on Ave D,

the songs faster, your frayed voice giving out
on the choruses. When did you know you were dying?
I saw your last show at the Academy of Music,
your Christmas spectacular. You looked as if
you were leaning back against that wall of sound,
letting it buoy and buffet you, and the audience,
frightened into an awkward tenderness,
tried to sing along.

Oranges and Lemons

Honeymoon-giddy, almost lightheaded with being
in London my first time, the city like a promise redeemed,
“the brave, old, melancholy color,” Henry James’ close reading
of the porous, soot-scoured skyline, the nursery rhyme
churches and bells, St. Martin’s and Bow, the antic,
venerable carnage at Covent Garden, where Mr. Punch laid low
Judy and baby and beadle, an incarnadine Old Nick —
“That’s the way to do it,” he prated and crowed.
All those books I buried my nose in
when I was meant to master something useful:
How glorious for us to be thronged by such companionable
ghosts, to climb to the garret where Dr. Johnson
set the English language right, or stand where Donne
woke too early with his lover and scolded the rising sun.

Speed Freaks (Buffalo, NY 1971)

It was the winter of yellow jackets and black beauties —
diet pills loose in a bowl like Halloween candy, Chick's trailer
half buried in drift scattershot with scurf and cinder
blown downwind from our neighbor Mohawk Steel and Foundry.

It was the winter my mouth always tasted of blood,
when we lived on Benzedrine, Tang, and toast,
and never went out before the sun slid behind the hoists
and razor wire fencing the steel yard.

That was the winter I dropped out of school.
Chick caught pneumonia and tried
walking to the VA hospital, until the cops picked him up on I-90,

wearing an army blanket over his camo fatigues,
the winter he swapped my picture for the blurry face of the lost kid
asking, “Have you seen me?” on a carton of curdled milk.

Ferry to Hart Island

Swapping out a single vowel changes the island’s name
to “hurt,” better suited to the city’s potter’s field, terminus
for its unclaimed dead, mapped to their mass graves,
where numbered coffins are stacked by shackled prisoners

in dayglo-green jumpsuits eager to work for 50 cents
an hour and a view of the East Bronx money can’t buy.
Not just the homeless make landfall here, in these dense
underground tenements, strict trenches chiefly occupied

by acre after acre of the poor, a handful of well-heeled
second cousins and great aunts unlucky enough to outlive
their connections, a few hundred “on loan” to med schools
and teaching hospitals, in the chill lingo of the civil service.

Yet even here, where the million dead are legion, how little
headway they’ve made on the marsh grass, the tawny cattails.

Tourist Cabins Loon Lake (1959)

In one, the faint tang of mildew and bleach informed
our sleep, in another, an archipelago of mossy stains
bloomed on the wallpaper — those tourist cabins my parents
rented for a week in August, when Brooklyn shimmered

like a fever dream, when my mother in her dust-colored
robe, and my father, bedded down on the couch in his BVDs,
forged their sullen, seasonal ceasefire. Money, money, money
sniggered the window fan, troubling the dead air.

The lake glittered, a sheet of tin. My mother burned,
my father browned. I sat on the porch, afraid of the sugar-drunk
yellowjackets loaded on Kool-Aid. Under the sun-dazzled
trees the leaf-filtered light made me think of coins, scattered

for a brother and sister to follow into the forest
until they found a house good enough to eat.

About the Author:
Aaron Fischer is a former editor at a progres-
sive news site. His poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in After Happy Hour, Briar Cliff
Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Journal of
American Poetry, Naugatuck River Review,
Sow’s Ear, Third Wednesday, Tishman Review,
and other publications. He has been nominated
twice for a Pushcart Prize, and his poem
“Aubade for LR” was chosen as one of the top
three sonnets of 2018 by the Maria W. Faust
Sonnet Contest. His chapbook, Black Stars of
Blood: The Weegee Poems, was published this
summer.

SALT OF THE Salt of the Nation is the story of Harry McBride,
a disillusioned gravel plant worker who impul-
NATION sively slugs the Republican presidential nomi-
nee during a campaign photo-op and instantly
by Matt Bloom becomes America’s most famous fugitive and
newest hero.
Paperback: 202 pages
Publishing date: April 1, 2019 Harry’s vicious punch is caught on camera and
Language: English immediately goes viral as he flees the scene of
ISBN-10: 1-950437-27-2 his crime and heads for Mexico. While being
ISBN-13: 978-1-950437-27-6 pursued across the country by a zealous born
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches again private investigator, Harry is taunted via
the airwaves by Grover Budd, a Rush Limbaugh
-like radio host who doggedly portrays Harry as
a subversive agent of the "socialist" Demo-
cratic Party.

Despite Grover Budd’s efforts, Harry soon be-
comes a role model to working-class men and a
sex symbol to disaffected women longing to
escape their unfulfilling lives. To a single moth-
er he meets, Harry is a healer with the power
to cure her chronically-ill son. College profes-
sors start teaching ad-hoc courses on Harry, a
song about him goes to number one, and radio
stations stage Harry McBride Punch-Out Con-
tests to raise money for the troops. That’s not
to mention the Harry McBride Society, hastily
contrived to cash in on the free-floating rage
and frustration to which Harry has given a
name and a face.

Set during the run-up to a pivotal presidential
election, Salt of the Nation is more than a road
story; it’s a novel about a land riven by broken
promises, thwarted dreams, and populism
gone awry. It’s the story of a contemporary
America equally divided and galvanized by an
ordinary man’s rash act and desperate journey.

Matt Bloom is an anti-money laundering inves-
tigator who lives in New York City with his wife,
Shelley Simmons-Bloom, and their cat, Bunny.
His three previous novels are Blue Para-
dise (1998), A Death in the Hamptons (2002),
and The Last Romantic (2005). His children’s
books are Hello, My Name is Bunny! (2016) and
Hello, My Name is Bunny! London (2018)

THE OPEN "The Open Door is a brilliant and vibrant collec-
tion of stories that spans the breadth and di-
DOOR versity of literary fiction, from grave to fun-
ny to poignant and all points in-between. It's
And Other Tales this range of technique and emotional engage-
ment that pulls the readers through each piece
of Love and and leaves them anticipating what comes
next. In a style reminiscent of Carson McCul-
Yearning lers, Piatigorsky presents stories that are vivid
with imagery while maintaining a dramatic
by Joram Piatigorsky element balanced by compassion for the char-
acters. These characters truly drive each sto-
Paperback: 214 ry to the point that you become one with
Publishing date: April 4, 2019 the fictional dream that the author weaves so
Language: English flawlessly. Even in being comfortably lost in the
ISBN-10: 1-950437-04-3 dream, you'll no doubt recognize upon reflec-
ISBN-13: 978-1-950437-04-7 tion that you are in the hands of a master story
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches -teller. If you take home only one short story
collection this year, let The Open Door be the
one!"
James Mathews, author of Last Known Posi-
tion; Winner, Katherine Anne Porter Prize in
Short Fiction

“A beautifully written collection that covers the
many territories between the real and the fan-
tastic but that focuses on lives compressed by
restraint and left desiring. A rich mix of art and
myth, shape-shifting and wide-awake dream-
ing.” - Barbara Esstman, author of The Other
Anna; Night Ride Home; A More Perfect Union

Joram Piatigorsky is a prominent molecular
biologist and eye researcher, major Inuit art
collector and writer, and son of renowned cel-
list Gregor Piatigorsky and Jacqueline de Roth-
schild. He is the author of the book Gene Shar-
ing and Evolution, a novel Jellyfish Have Eyes,
and a memoir The Speed of Dark. The Open
Door is his first published collection of short
stories. To learn more: joramp.com

Moscovich’s Blink If You Love Me set in modern
-day Portugal, is a novel about the intimacies
and cultural, socio-linguistic idiosyncrasies in-
herent in marrying into and cohabiting with a
close-knit family as an outsider. Struggling with
his adopted tongue, the narrator of the novel is
cursed with a tendency to imbue everyday
speech with innuendo at large family gather-
ings. His wife Eva’s unique perspective and
approach to coping proves to be transforma-
tive, as the newlyweds adapt to their ridicu-
lously disharmonious lifestyle.

BLINK IF YOU David Moscovich is the Romanian-American
author of You Are Make Very Important Bath-
LOVE ME time (JEF Books, 2013) and LIFE+70[Redacted],
a print version of the single most expensive
by David Moscovich literary e-book to ever be hacked (Lit Fest
Press, 2016.) Blink If You Love Me is his latest
Paperback: 158 pages novel, published by Adelaide Books.
Publishing date: April 1, 2019
Language: English You Are Make Very Important Bathtime (JEF
ISBN-10: 1-950437-29-9 Books: Chicago, 2013) is a novel of flash fictions
ISBN-13: 978-1-950437-29-0 about a Westerner’s failure to navigate Japa-
nese culture clash, a celebration of the beauty
of misunderstanding and the inadvertent poet-
ry of bad grammar. LIFE+70[Redacted], pub-
lished by Lit Fest Press in 2016, is the printed
version of the single most expensive literary e-
book ever to be hacked. Before it was stolen,
the one and only e-book was priced at
US$249,999.99.

Recipient of fellowships from New York Univer-
sity, International House New York and spon-
sorship from the New York Foundation for the
Arts (NYFA), he holds an MFA in Fiction from
NYU and is editor and publisher of Louffa Press,
a micro-press dedicated to printing innovative
fiction in collectible, handprinted chapbooks as
well as artist books.

Moscovich is a writer and freelance journalist
and lives in New York City and Porto, Portugal.

Couchsurfing: the Musical charts both a physi-
cal and psychological journey as author ex-
plores the fast-growing travel phenomenon of
Couchsurfing. Middle-aged and set in his ways,
he starts as a skeptic. Who would want to
spend the night in the home of a complete
stranger? While knocking on the doors of thirty
-five of these strangers across nine countries,
starting in Tel Aviv and ending in Boston, he
realizes that He would, and maybe he’ll not
only save money, but find himself changed for
the better by the experience. Balancing the
forward motion of his Couchsurfing adventures
are glimpses back into the past, seen through
the quirky lens of musicals that have played a
part in his life.

COUCHSURFING: Gary Pedler has written two adult novels, a YA
novel, two story collections, and, a little to his
The Musical surprise, a play. A resident of San Francisco for
longer than he cares to admit, Gary qualifies as
by Gary Pedler a true Bay Area denizen. Yet after a recent es-
cape from his white-collar wage slave job, he’s
Paperback: 232 pages spent much of his time rambling around the
Publishing date: March 1, 2019 world and, of course, writing about everything
Language: English he sees. Find out more about Gary at
ISBN-10: 1-950437-39-6 www.garypedler.com."
ISBN-13: 978-1-950437-39-9
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches

OF BREEDING Young Archie Bingham, the son of Sir Archibald
Bingham, an eminent British barrister, discov-
AND BIRTH ers that his father is keeping a mistress and
he’s horrified. Bingham’s life soon becomes
by Rita Baker motivated by a passion for revenge against his
father, which leads to his own downfall. His
Paperback: 444 pages destructive behavior necessitates him emi-
Publishing date: April 1, 2019 grating from England, where he practiced law,
Language: English to America. There, in time, he becomes a New
ISBN-10: 1-950437-40-X York Assistant District Attorney.
ISBN-13: 978-1-950437-40-5
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches When Bingham tries to blackmail Joseph Bo-
cacci, a businessman with past ties to the mob,
Bocacci enlists his adopted grandson, Frankie
Leeman, an American lawyer, to investigate
him. Leeman travels to London where he learns
about Bingham’s catastrophic time at Cam-
bridge University, his shocking behavior as an
articled clerk, rumors of gambling and embez-
zlement, and his connection to the unsolved
murder of an underage, pregnant, waitress.

During the investigation, Leeman explores Lon-
don and he’s introduced to a painter named
Cynthia. Leeman suspects his heart will eventu-
ally be broken, but he enters into a torrid love
affair with Cynthia and they visit Italy. There,
Leeman comes to learn about his own mysteri-
ous roots, and Joseph Bocacci’s connection to
the murder of his parents. Leeman uncovers a
series of seductions, betrayals, and lies that
culminate in a shocking conclusion.

Rita Baker says: "BORN OF LOVE mirrors my
own life in many ways. My grandparents were
Polish immigrants and, having been brought up
by them, I came to understand what life was
like for such immigrants in the early part of the
20th century. I also lost my parents at an early
age, and understand the conflict of living with
two very different sets of families. I had to
become self-reliant or go crazy. Like Tova, I had
to find the strength to deal with it. Discovering
who you are and where you belong is not for
the timid.

TRAVERSE: joyous moments of his life as well and the hope
of a greater destiny is rekindled within him.
The Path to World Merrill MaGeah, Elder of an ancient Clan from
the British Isles, arrives to bring Mac home...for
Peace the first time. During their travels, Mac learns
of his family's past - a family he never knew he
by W.A. Holdsworth had - and the nobility of his ancestors. Arriving
in England, Mac meets the families of the Clan
Paperback: 362 pages Camulodunum. Kyle Dunham, Keeper of the
Publishing date: February 15, 2019 Clan's history, tells of the man for whom the
Language: English Clan was founded fifteen-hundred years ago.
ISBN-10: 1-949180-97-2 From the ashes of the Roman Empire, he had
ISBN-13: 978-1-949180-97-8 created a realm so wondrous that every gener-
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches ation since has dreamt of its rebirth. Mac
learns as well that the Clan's founding families
William "Mac" MacCrarey has invited Death to had sworn to protect the founder's descend-
come for him on a lonely winter's night in the ants, only one of whom was still alive...and he
small northern town of Traverse. As the end tried to kill himself! Kyle and Merrill arrange to
draws near, vivid and revealing scenes from his have Mac appointed to the United Nations,
past flash through his mind, laying bare a sad much to the consternation of Senators Jack
and lonely life. But, then, he relives the most Abrams and Mitchell Thomas, arrogant and
driven men who despise the UN and what it
stands for. The cold and ruthless UN Secretary-
General Rene Boujeau and his Under-Secretary
General Gerhardt Schoen already knew of the
Clan, but now realize who Mac is. For more
than thirty years, they'd secretly hand-selected
military dictators to rule third-world nations
across the near East and Africa, selling their
natural resources on the Black Market to buy
military weaponry. Now, the last descendant is
in their midst. Schoen wants Mac dead, but
Boujeau refuses to risk a scandal when their
clandestine plan to recast the UN as a world
power is so near its completion.

W. A. Holdsworth lives in Michigan and attend-
ed the University of Michigan, Oakland Univer-
sity, and Michigan State University, earning an
engineering degree and an MBA. He’s worked
as a business and government consultant, and
now serves as a Director for one of the largest
counties in the U.S. An avid reader of adven-
ture novels, he didn’t begin writing until his
late thirties while working and raising a family.
A fan of the Arthurian legend, he wanted to
bring the story of Arthur and Camelot into the
modern world with a series of novels that are
both exciting and meaningful. The result was
Traverse, and its sequel Novum Orbis Regium.
He is now writing the next book in the trilogy.