Turning the Stars

By Joshua Ginsberg

Turning the Stars is the latest collection of poetry by writer Joshua Ginsberg. Spanning two decades, this collection of urban verbal snapshots form a collage of different cities, experiences and emotions. Individually Ginsberg’s poems explore themes of love, loss and the search for security within a constantly changing internal and external landscape. Viewed collectively, it becomes a meditation on the passage of time with motifs borrowed from sources ranging from mythology and astrology to pop culture and technology. Ginsberg reexamines relationships and childhood memories through the filters of both nostalgic wonder and hard-won wisdom to come away with insights that are sometimes painful, sometimes and always novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483529653

Book preview

Hematology

Introduction

Then, all too soon, it's over. The credits have rolled and faded to black, the curtains have come down and the lights in the theatre have switched back on. The last encore has played and finally the last fan has abandoned any hope that there's more yet to come. It's over, for sure, it's done, go home already…

Without fail, that's when it happens,

that's when something stirs.

It's imperceptible at first, just a sense that something has shifted, a change in magnetic fields, followed by a slight wind rattling the dust… A wind that fails to taper off but rather builds in force, sweeping the ashes into a miniature cyclone. The embers thought long dead and frozen start, against all logic and laws of physics, to glow, to pulse. In the blink of an eye (though none are still watching) there's ignition.

Its Lovecraft's elder gods roused from their slumber. It's Osiris, reconfigured from pieces gathered by Isis along the banks of the Nile. Or perhaps it's something more mundane, the cicada leaving its shell still clutching a tree branch, the Silicon Valley startup that manages to survive its infancy in spite of its creators… ulitmately,

It's the story of the Phoenix,

of rebirth, reincarnation.

It's archetypal – ingrained in each of us and reinforced in movies, graphic novels and video games – in the stories we live and live by. It's embedded in the pores of our bones, encoded in neural networks, etched somewhere deeper than our earliest ancestral, tribal memories feeding