Happy pub day to Big Island Beatnik: Poetry & Photography from the Lower East Rift Zone (Alien Buddha Press), now available via Amazon!
Read an excerpt here.
"The sweetest winds play
On this rugged coastline
Preserved in time today
As I offer my prayers here too…"
James Schwartz returns to Alien Buddha Press with Big Island Beatnik, his fifth release following Motor City Mix (2022), Sunset in Rome (2022), Long Lost Friend (2023), and Some Are and Most Aren't and It's Always Been Like That: Selected Poems 2004-2024 (2024). This collection drifts between poetry and photography, capturing the Lower East Rift Zone in all its burning, blooming, ever-shifting beauty.
Schwartz is a poet of movement—across landscapes, through memory, into transformation. Volcanoes churn, dolphins rise, crystal bowls ring. In sacred spaces and humid diners, in ash-covered beaches and moonlit bodies, he finds divinity, always. The rhythm is hypnotic, the vision uncontainable. Sit with these pages. Breathe. The Pacific is impossibly azure. The lava still flows.
FOREWORD by Rev. Dr. Raymont Anderson - Founding Minister and Spiritual Director of The Center for Spiritually Integrated Arts
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