The Mysterious Location of Kyrgyzstan

By David Allan Cates

David Allan Cates, award-winning writer of five novels, plumbs the quiet and bizarre complexities of decades-old love in this, his first collection of poetry. In a startling voice—meditative, playful, and erotic—Cates uses memory and imagination to create indelible images of the body and desire, of separation and longing. The speaker imagines the precarious predicament of young French lovers sitting on bench in Mexico, chronicles his great aunt Edna’s “parade of lovers,” or conjures an ancient people as they talked “to the sky or the earth/or invisible animals, chewed coca and staked/hairless enemies to the ground”; yet “sometimes/they loved--/did I mention that? Like we do.”

Located between the exotic and the domestic, between the lived and imagined, these nineteen poems, some of which appeared previously in The Sun and Transmission, among other publications, describe the off-balance and dangerous dance of lovers. In a world in which “we know sometimes/it’s the same Great Notion/that hoists magnificent stones and builds a great pyramid/as destroys a city and makes ashes of children—” these poems sweetly lack cynicism for enduring love. In one, the speaker anticipates reuniting with his wife after her sojourn at a monastery. And in another, a rootless couple can imagine, if only for a moment, how the volcanoes across the water might “bind the bay,” and give them a chance to begin again.

Because of—and despite—a world in which bombs fall and luck turns bad, the speaker in these poems struggles to situate himself—in a pond, on the ledge of a cliff, or through his own re-invention of the world: “Sparks fall and I seek shelter where I can--/naked on the wing, a hero in wet socks--/but I’m flattering myself again./It’s raining stars, love, I’ll say, and maybe you’ll hear me./ Maybe I’ll feel you near.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Satellite Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310402951

David Allan Cates

David Allan Cates is the author of five novels, and a collection of poetry, The Mysterious Location of Kyrgyzstan. His novel Hunger In America was a New York Times Notable Book, X Out Of Wonderland and Freeman Walker, both Montana Book Award Honor Books; and Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home and Tom Connor's Gift were both winners of Gold Medal for Best Fiction in the Independent Book Publishers Book Awards.Cates is the winner of the 2010 Montana Arts Council’s Innovative Artist Award . His stories and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and his travel articles in Outside Magazine and the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler.

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THE MYSTERIOUS LOCATION OF KYRGYZSTAN

DAVID ALLAN CATES

A SATELLITE PRESS BOOK

COPYRIGHT 2015 ©

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING AND RECORDING, OR BY ANY INFORMATIONAL STORAGE OR RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER.

Editor, Janice Kidd

Cover Design By Kevin Draper and Ivan Himanen

eBook typeset By Daniel Talsky

Cover Photograph By Lora Robertson

Manufactured In the United States of America

CATES, DAVID ALLAN, 1956— .

THE MYSTERIOUS LOCATION OF KYRGYZSTAN / DAVID ALLAN CATES

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What People are Saying

I have been an admirer of David Allan Cates’ exquisite fiction since the publication of a chapbook from HUNGER IN AMERICA, his first novel. I have also harbored the long-held hunch that Cates is secretly a poet. The nineteen poems of THE MYSTERIOUS LOCATION OF KYRGYZSTAN confirm my suspicions